Geass Noir
by Aki1
Summary: AU / When the Britannian Crown Prince is murdered in his own home, everyone in the Royal Family becomes a suspect. As the primary detective assigned to the case, Suzaku thinks this might finally be the death of him; that is, if a certain raven-haired pianist at the bar he calls his second home doesn't kill him first. / slash, SuzaLulu
1. some days

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either.

Author's Notes: I've said this somewhere before, but: I'm no expert on noir. In fact, if I wanted to be more precise, I ought to be calling this 'Geass Hardboiled' but oh well. Put briefly, these crime fiction literary styles – with their bleak settings, somber characterizations, and unapologetic treatment of sex and violence – have always intrigued me. Admittedly, I'm more familiar with film noir, in all its black-and-white, jazz-filled, femme-fatale-induced glory, and that isn't saying all that much. Still, I got this idea of marrying the two – _Code Geass _and noir, that is – because I always imagined the combination would be amusing. You guys be the judge as to whether that's so.

(By the way, this was on my journal for some time, and it will probably be cross–posted there as I go along…unless/until I change my mind. It's hard to tell at this point. Sporadic updates will be sporadic; I have a longfic and another project going on, and this [unfortunately] takes least priority. I've found it's an effective way to de-stress though; who would have thought?)

Warnings: In general, bleakness-of-setting (part of the medium!), references to violence and sex and alcohol. Strong language. And a Suzaku-who-hates-his-job.

Enjoy.

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_**(1) 'The Beginning is the End is the Beginning'**_

It started the way the day started: cold, dreary, an unspoken promise of worse things to come. Also, Anya shaking him awake at his desk. "Case," was all she said, as though that explained everything he needed to know.

But as she walked away Suzaku realized, rubbing his eyes and fumbling for his keys, that it did.

The first thought that came to his mind when they arrived was that someone had botched the address. Or that this was someone's (Gino's?) idea of a joke. As he stepped out of the car, though, he saw the mess of tape criss-crossing in front of the main entrance, men in uniforms waving around flashlights as though that would do anything. There was a group of servants – butler, chefs, maids, his mind supplied, taking in their uniforms – huddled near the fountain, terrified to go _near_ the damn house.

Suzaku heaved a sigh and swiped his felt hat and a pack of cigarettes from the backseat. He was about to tell Anya something, but when he realized what it was, she was already halfway to the gate.

The men guarding the perimeter let them in without a word, as though they'd been expected. Inside, the mansion was all lit–up, sickening against the shadows of dusk creeping along outside. There were _more_ people in here, if that was possible – beat cops of every size and shape and constitution, members of the Royal Guard.

_A murder takes place at the Crown Prince's residence, and everyone in Pendragon flocks to the place like it's a party._

Bismarck spotted them from across the room. He excused himself from his conversation with the constable and made his way over, and the sheer size of the file he had in his hand almost made Suzaku want to turn around and not ever involve himself with this case.

"You're late," the large man informed him gruffly.

"Yeah." There wasn't much else he could think of to say. "What do we have?" he asked, taking the file from his boss's hands.

"Your usual bread and butter." Bismarck nodded at Anya with an unreadable look as she slung her bag onto an empty couch and began unpacking her equipment. "The body was found about forty minutes ago. Call came at around the same time."

Suzaku opened the file, and he raised his eyebrows before he could help himself when he saw exactly who their victim was. "Bismarck," he said in a low voice, flipping through page after page of resident profiles, blueprints, preliminary witness statements, and all those other pleasantries of his job which promised to have him buried in paperwork for the next fortnight. "What are we doing here? This is out of our – "

"Jurisdiction, normally." The man surprised him with a grave nod. "But our client – who, by the way, is offering the department fifty thousand pounds if we can pull this off – insisted on our involvement, despite everything I told him."

He snapped the file shut. In his head he tried to count the number of people who lived here, worked here, had access to even _one_ of the doors or windows in this sprawling estate. Then there was the matter of foreign guests and delegates, all of them for the past month, and _oh God_ the newspapers in the morning... "I still don't think we should be here."

"That's unfortunate then, because our client specifically asked for _you_."

Suzaku frowned. He considered opening the file again, but he could have sworn he hadn't seen the information there the first time; it wasn't going to be there now. "Who is it?"

Bismarck merely ushered him to the next room – "It's too bad we can't deny royalty anything; that's just how it works" – and told him.

Suzaku set his jaw and refused to show any emotion when he heard the name. In hindsight, he should have seen that coming from miles away, but hindsight was often twenty-twenty. God _damn_ it.

The current Crown Prince, Odysseus eu Britannia, was now no more than a corpse in his own grand dining room, his eyes frozen half-open on the chandelier and an eerie smile on his face. A single slash ran across his throat, and in all that time he'd managed to bleed a wide pool all over the fine Persian rug underfoot.

He didn't dabble too much in politics himself (too much vodka; too many dead people turning up in dumpsters all over Pendragon, week after goddamned week), but he knew enough. The eldest son of Emperor Charles and his first wife, Odysseus had never been much of a prominent figure, staying in the sidelines while his younger siblings made names for themselves abroad, in court, on the battlefield. He had no ground-breaking laws to his credit, no contribution to the arts and just a mediocre popularity with the people. It was a pathetic end to a pathetic life, Suzaku thought absently, noting the lack of any defensive wounds all over the man's body.

He couldn't see the murder weapon anywhere, but from the bloody gash on the victim's neck, it didn't take much to guess what it was. But that meant –

A short, maniacal laugh cut into his thoughts, and Suzaku steeled himself for what was going to be a long, long night. "Well look what the cavalry just brought in. You're late, Detective Kururugi."

"Waiting for Christmas," he bit out. It was the middle of July.

"Oh? Well it came early for me this year." Luciano grinned and swept an arm over the crime scene. "I couldn't have asked for anything better if the old man sat down and promised me anything in the world!"

"That's nice," Suzaku said bluntly. He gave his trenchcoat and hat to one of the beat cops wandering around, snapping on a pair of gloves. He hated working with this man, _so_ much, but he couldn't deny that Luciano Bradley was the undisputed expert on knives and knife wounds in their department. Sometimes it was disturbing, how much he knew, but any questions about the man's background _before_ he'd joined the Homicide department were always met with disturbing laughter and offers of 'demonstration,' so he never really found out. He never really wanted to, after that. "What are we dealing with?"

"Typical wedge-blade." Luciano ducked down and spread the flesh apart on both sides of the wound with his fingers, smiling gleefully as Anya snapped a picture – another one they wouldn't be able to use as evidence, and Suzaku was dangerously close to snapping at the man to _put some damn gloves on_. "Would have been a straight, neat cut, if it hadn't gotten caught here." He pointed to a slight dip in the wound's path, roughly where it crossed the trachea. "An amateur, I'd say."

Suzaku nodded, taking notes. He noticed a dark, reddish stain on the victim's pants leg that didn't seem to be blood. Crouching down, he took the material between his fingers – too thin, not congealed, definitely something else. "What makes you say that?"

He immediately regretted the question when he felt the man suddenly hovering behind him, and the blade of a trench knife pressed against his neck.

"An expert," Luciano spoke into his ear, "would have aimed here." He slid his hand down until he was holding the knife diagonally, blade right across the carotid. "Instant death. Or here." He maneuvered the blade to the other side, the tip barely pressing down into his skin. "That's assuming he went for a quick, painless job; would have been messy as hell though. Blood all over, we'd be scrubbing it off the walls. On the other hand, if he'd wanted to drag it out – make the victim suffer, you know – he'd have done this..."

"Okay." Suzaku reached up and wrenched the man's arm away, deciding he'd had about enough. "I get it. He'd have been a man after your own heart, but he's not." A sudden flash made him squint, and in two seconds Anya was muttering something about a 'missed shot' under her breath. Oh God, not her too. "Did you find the weapon anywhere?" he asked, rising to his feet.

"Nope!" Thankfully, Luciano backed off. His relief was short-lived though, as the man was soon bending over and nonchalantly handling the corpse again, still sans gloves. "That would have been too easy."

It would, Suzaku agreed silently.

Meticulously sweeping the room didn't yield much in terms of useful clues. There was a scrap of fabric pinned underneath the leg of a chair that didn't match any of the Prince's clothes, but there wasn't any blood or anything incriminating on it either. An empty glass on the table repaid traces of something clear and waxy on one side of the rim, upon closer study. Other than that, the place was pristine: no broken windows or jimmied locks, no upturned furniture or signs of _any_ kind of a fight at all, no footprints on the carpet, no bloody handprints on the walls.

If he didn't know better, it was almost as though the struggle (because there _had_ to be one) took place elsewhere, and the body had just been moved here. This whole crime scene, staged, Suzaku imagined as he pulled on his coat, but that was an absurd thought.

"Where's the client?"

Bismarck dismissed yet another tearful, shaking maid and looked up. "You want to speak with him?"

Suzaku scowled. "I don't have a choice, do I?"

"No. You don't." There wasn't any sympathy whatsoever in that affirmation as Bismarck leafed through his notes; _thanks_, he wanted to say. "I'm sorry to say you'll have to put that prospect on hold, though. Apparently he left Pendragon right after making the call. Business meeting, or something."

"You're kidding." Who the _hell_ in his right mind would skip town right after reporting a murder, and of his own family no less? It already didn't help that his client, despite being the one who supposedly found the body, was one who had a motive in this whole mess _by default_, and this was going to be painful to explain to even the most optimistic of detectives.

"I have seven witnesses outside who would argue otherwise."

"This is ridiculous." Suzaku rubbed at his eyes furiously; it was all he could do not to claw them out and fling them against the wall, screaming all the way. He should have known that, even after four years, this man (their _client_, his mind echoed bitterly) could still find a way to make his life more of a living hell than it already was. That was saying a lot. "Can you have someone call me the minute he gets back in town?"

"I can do that." Bismarck nodded, making a note of it. "The usual number?"

He recalled the last time Kallen slammed the phone down on a key witness when he wasn't home. "No." He put on his hat, lit a cigarette (thank _God_) and gave Bismarck the number to the bar.

========== 0

_**(2) 'All Shook Up' **_

_Arthur's Castle_ smelled like it always did when Suzaku pushed open the heavy oak door and finally stopped counting down the steps between him and vodka in his head. A moment, as always, was all it took for the onslaught of smoke to subside; other scents followed closely by, more subdued but no less familiar – beer and metal and perfumes from the handful of women who were regulars at this place, and also something he'd never been able to identify, a heady aroma seeped into the barstools and tables, into the walls.

"You know I've always wanted to try this place out!" Gino Weinberg, all six feet and then some of him, was actually bouncing on the balls of his feet as they entered. At no point in time, between leaving Odysseus' mansion and now, had he considered bringing the younger detective along of his own volition. But Anya had needed a ride back to the office, and Gino was asking him about his plans two seconds in, and really – he ought to stop saying 'yes' to everything, one of these days. "So who's Arthur?"

"I..." He frowned. "Don't actually know." Which was surprising, considering –

"Huh." Gino flashed him a wide smile, all bright teeth and sincerity and glittering blue eyes. "Don't you come here often?"

"Not that often." It came out sounding a little too defensive. "Come on," he said, steering the blond towards one of a row of tables set along the wall opposite the bar. "Before we lose it."

Gino parked himself rather gleefully into one of the seats, ignoring the angry glares from the couple who had been two steps away. Suzaku offered a half-hearted apology (but really, what the hell did they expect?) before sliding into the other chair. It didn't even seem that sturdy, and there was a questionable stain on the surface of the table, near his elbow.

"So is it usually this packed, or is today something special?"

He shrugged. But tonight there was indeed a thicker crowd than he was accustomed to, office workers and beat cops and some patrons he could have sworn were too young to be here knocking back glasses and keeping the staff busy. A group of eight businessmen took up three tables and an entire corner of the place, laughing amongst themselves through expensive cigars. The smoke was thick, and it rendered the air nearly opaque. Then again, he'd never been here this early before; a quick glance at the clock informed him it was barely eight in the evening, when he would usually walk in closer to eleven on a good day. "Maybe," he said, which wasn't an answer, but until he could come up with something better it was as good as Gino was going to get.

That would be a difficult endeavor, though. Gino's idle chatter had barely been enough to distract him on the way over (among other things: _eyes on the road_, as well, and all that) but now he found his mind drifting back to their current case, despite his best efforts. It was somewhat disconcerting to think that the usual things didn't bother him anymore – the corpse was actually one of the better ones, and as for crime scenes he'd had his share of both those that were messier and those that had been scrubbed clean of any useful evidence. The murder itself would have been less than remarkable, if not for all the damn _people_ involved: a prince dead left in suspicion too many royals and nobles for his liking, not to mention the personal staff and contacts of every last one.

And then there was the man who dragged him into this mess in the first place –

"Okay, I get it. You're pissed off. But don't you think you ought to let the napkin ring off the hook? I can assure you it's innocent."

Suzaku blinked, realizing belatedly that he'd been glaring at the object without even really seeing it. "Sorry," he mumbled, managing a weak smile. "God, I don't even know what's wrong with me." That wasn't entirely true – 'many, many things' would have been an appropriate answer, but he wasn't in the mood to itemize.

"Mmm. It's the case, isn't it?" Gino didn't acknowledge his glance, still grinning as he waved over a waitress. "Sorry I couldn't come to the scene this afternoon. Had to finish up a report for the Haliburton file."

He remembered that case: male, fifteen years old; cause of death was officially cardiac arrest, which naturally raised suspicions of foul play due to the boy's age. Gino had been the primary, though, so he was sketchy on the details. Still, he decided not to ask how that had been resolved. "You in?"

"I think we're _all_ in!" Gino laughed heartily. "Bismarck gave me a copy of the file a few minutes before you guys arrived. Hoo boy, that's a lot of paperwork."

"Yeah," he agreed.

"Except that's the least of your concerns right now, yes?"

Suzaku laughed at that, and it came more easily this time. For all his general immaturity and tendency to be flip about absolutely everything, Gino knew him pretty well. And he could be strangely perceptive when he wanted to be, which helped in more ways than one – Gino Weinberg, against all first impressions, was arguably the best interrogator in their department. And he did it all with a smile. "That's not saying much, you know."

"I know." Gino snuck in a wink before turning to the girl now standing expectantly beside their table. "Evening, Miss. I'll take a pint of Guinness, and my friend will have...well, whatever he's having."

She nodded, and there was a glint of amusement in her eyes; for what was not the first time today, Suzaku felt as though maybe the rest of the world really _were_ sharing a joke, and he was hopelessly not in on it. "Coming right up," she said, before turning to him with an face that clearly spoke of recognition. "I've never seen you come in this early before," she commented. There was just enough innocent cheer in her voice to mask out the unsaid, _'Or with a friend.'_ Or maybe Suzaku was imagining things.

That was probably the safer bet. "Decided I should probably start sleeping more," he smiled back, which earned a chuckle from Gino. "God knows I'm paying for it already..." He took in her long, straight hair, endless legs and very expressive eyes, but wound up drawing a blank. He flushed. "Um – "

"Shirley," she supplied, trying not to laugh. "Anyway, the usual for you?" He nodded dumbly, and she took that as her cue to leave. "I'll be right back!"

"So..." Gino didn't even wait until she'd taken three steps. "You don't come here that often, huh?"

"Drop it," Suzaku sighed, hanging his head. He wondered how many of the other staff recognized him as well, aside from the bartender and Millay and now Shirley. Did he really spend so much time here? He muttered, "This is embarrassing."

"She's pretty, though." Gino swept his gaze quickly across the room. "A lot of them are. I don't think I blame you."

"Sorry to disappoint you," he said wryly, only now remembering to shrug off his coat. "But I don't come here to ogle the waitresses, thank you very much."

"Well you should." The blond mimicked his actions, but instead of folding his jacket and setting it aside, he merely let the garment fall where it did, rumpled and bunched around his waist. "Seriously though, I think you have a _problem_."

Not helping. "Don't," he began; it ended up sounding less like an order and more like a pathetic request. "I get enough nagging from Kallen."

"Speaking of Kallen." Gino's eyes twinkled, and Suzaku almost groaned at how easily he'd _walked right into it_. "Is she seeing anyone?"

"I don't know," he grumbled. He barely remembered to smile when Shirley returned with their drinks. And even when he did, it was less out of courtesy and more out of _vodka, God yes finally_. "Why don't you ask her yourself?"

"Because it's easier if you do!" Gino chirped, as though that made everything okay. He raised his mug in an old–fashioned toast. Somehow Suzaku found it in himself to oblige him without a sarcastic remark. "Damn. I wish _I_ lived with a beautiful woman who tried to pull me away from my self–destructive habits."

"No you don't," Suzaku deadpanned. He held the glass to his lips, clenched his eyes shut and threw his head back. He knew by now when to swallow, when _not_ to breathe, and when to expect the familiar, comforting burn to fade into an equally-comforting warmth. It spread from his throat to his stomach like a balm. "I promise you."

Gino merely stared at him, incredulous. His own drink sat barely touched on the table. "Wow. You _do_ have a problem."

Suzaku decided not to answer that. Toying with the empty glass he saw, to his great disappointment, that Shirley was already out of sight. Damn it. He supposed a walk to the bar wouldn't kill him then. Scanning the area behind the counter for the usual blue-haired man, he found him – and, someone else as well, sitting on the other side of the counter, staring at his own empty glass with his hands folded in front of him. "Hey, Gino," he said, rising to his feet. "I'll be right back."

Gino waved him away as he took a sip of his beer. "Take your time," he said through a moustache of foam.

In the end, Suzaku didn't have to wait long for the woman to vacate the stool next to the pianist. He bowed his head a little as she walked past, and she spared him a smile.

"So this is why there's no music tonight," he began in jest, settling down and placing his glass on the counter. The lights were a bit brighter here at the bar, and it was either for that or for the sting of endless cigarette smoke that Suzaku found himself squinting. "Though I don't remember if you usually play at this time."

"You wouldn't," the man agreed, slipping easily into the conversation, "given that you wouldn't normally show up for another two or three hours."

Maybe he _did_ come here that often. "I love how everyone here seems to know my schedule," Suzaku muttered.

The man laughed – a cultured, restrained sound. He wondered if it was real. "I'm sure we appreciate the repeat business. And no," he added, swivelling his stool. Suzaku thought then that his eyes were not quite like amethysts, but perhaps something a little less bright, and a little more deep – irises, maybe. Or maybe he was wrong; they really were an interesting color. "I actually have tonight off."

"Oh?"

The pianist nodded towards the stage, which was no longer empty; there was a crew there, unwrapping some large, cumbersome things as a stocky man looked on from the wings. "Jazz band tonight. The saxophone player is Millay's friend, and she owed him a favor. They're playing three sets over the weekend."

"Huh." Suzaku watched them with mild interest. "So why are you still here?"

The man smirked. "Tiring of my company already?"

"That's not what I meant." Perhaps, if Suzaku were less tired, he could have made that sound more apologetic, more earnest. "Most people don't spend their days off in the exact same place where they work..." He trailed off, glumly realizing how many weekends he'd spent at his desk, or hunting for fingerprints. "Well..."

"Yes," the man acknowledged. "You're right. But most people don't work in the same place they turn to for relief, as well."

"Hmm." Suzaku traced the rim of the glass with his finger, glancing at the man beside him with a bit more scrutiny now. He was wearing a white dress shirt, with the collar rumpled and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was a slight tightness around his eyes, and there were a few streaks of red in the whites. The downward curl of his mouth would have seemed almost like a default expression, if only Suzaku didn't know better. "Rough day?" he guessed.

The man blinked, and set his jaw. "...Something like that." He didn't look at Suzaku when he replied, and he didn't smile.

He felt something that suspiciously resembled sympathy shifting in his chest. What would Gino say, in this situation? He imagined things like _'I'm sorry to hear that'_ or _Tomorrow will be better!'_ complete with a cheerful grin and a pat on the shoulder, but he was not one for such platitudes. He had never been. Still, it surprised him that what he eventually ended up saying was something that was probably out of place and completely uncalled-for: "What's your name?"

The man looked up at him. He was startled for a moment, but that soon went away, and his expression melted into something that was equal parts curious and suspicious, all of it calculating. "Why?" he asked, after almost a full minute.

Suzaku shrugged. "Well, I've learned tonight that it seems _everyone_ who works at this bar knows me, so..." He tried to smile, but he didn't need a mirror to know it came out crooked. "May as well?"

He got a raised eyebrow, and amusement, for his trouble. "Fair enough. If I give you my name, will I get yours in return?"

Suzaku really should have seen that coming, but he realized he didn't quite like where this was going. He saw his chance, however, when he spotted the blue-haired bartender coming their way. "How about something better?" he suggested, smiling and avoiding those violet eyes.

"You're early," he heard, for the third time that night. The bartender took their empty glasses and met his eye with a tired look. "Vodka gimlet?"

"And whatever he's having," Suzaku nodded towards the pianist to his left.

The bartender turned to the raven-haired man, who seemed equally-surprised. "And that is?"

It took him awhile. "Another martini, I suppose?"

Suzaku made a face as soon as the bartender set back to work. "Gin," he commented sourly.

"You do realize traditional gimlets contain gin, right?"

"And I specifically didn't ask for one. Tastes like melted-down steel." At the man's bemused stare, Suzaku felt himself flush. "My father's description, not mine."

"Hmmm." The man didn't take his eyes off him even as their drinks arrived, even as Suzaku downed his and asked for another before the bartender could leave. "Lelouch."

"What?"

"My name." The pianist sipped at his martini in a manner much more reserved, actually bothering to savor it. "I feel as though I should be sorrier than I am, that it cost you a drink."

"Don't be." Suzaku was beginning to feel light-headed, though it should have taken much more than just two drinks for him to reach this point. Perhaps it was all the smoke, or perhaps he really was that tired. Or perhaps...his brain failed to come up with a third possibility. "It's fine. Play me something the next time you're at the piano."

Lelouch smiled. "I'll accept those terms," he murmured, finally sliding his eyes away.

It was about the same time that the bartender walked back to them, another vodka gimlet in tow. There was something else, though: a phone, held in his right hand. "I have a call here for Suzaku Kururugi?" he asked, giving the detective a pointed look.

Suzaku took the glass from him and looked around, scanning the room for – "See the tall blond over there, talking to Millay?" He pointed at the stage, where Gino was regaling the singer with something ridiculous, if her boisterous laughter was anything to go by. God, he had better not have lost their coats. "That's your guy."

The bartender gave him a long, hard look. After several confused blinks, he sighed and moved away.

"That wasn't very nice," Lelouch commented, his lips quirking ever so slightly.

Suzaku smirked into his drink. The strong scent of alcohol dulled his senses. He suddenly felt very, very warm. "He's a colleague, and the call's probably from work. Plus I thought I'd do the guy a favor."

Lelouch scoffed. "Rivalz is far too transparent. _Everyone_ knows, save perhaps Millay herself."

"Isn't that tragic." Suzaku drank only half this time, not entirely surprised to find himself wanting. "Rivalz, huh."

"Another drink says you've forgotten all our names by tomorrow," Lelouch rolled his eyes.

"Now _that_ wasn't nice," Suzaku chuckled. He paused, and then laughed again, somehow unable to help himself. He felt...he didn't want to use the word _giddy_, but that was the only thing his brain could offer right now. Which was odd. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like this. "I'm not – "

"Hey." He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up. Blearily, he could make out Gino standing over him, already wearing his coat and with Suzaku's slung over his arm. "That was Bismarck."

"Client back in town?" He didn't wait for the other detective to nod. "Good. I'll talk to him in the morning."

"Ah, actually..." Gino looked at him, then at Lelouch, and back again. He looked as though he didn't know how to phrase what he was about to say. "The client's at the office right now. He's been asking for you."

"_What._ " That cleared up some of the haze in his head. "You're not serious. It's – what is it – " He glanced at the clock. "It's almost nine!"

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger," Gino grinned. "Again, he was asking for _you_. And he was...uh, rather insistent."

Suzaku groaned and buried his face in his hands. Of course he was.

"Gimme your keys." He didn't budge, and Gino eventually fished them out of his coat pocket anyway. "I'll be outside," he said, depositing the coat onto Suzaku's shoulders. "Sober up a bit and let's go."

Murmuring several obscenities under his breath, he could feel Lelouch's eyes on him again as he slipped his arms into the coat sleeves. "Demanding client who doesn't respect the typical workday?" the pianist guessed.

"I'll kill him," Suzaku mumbled darkly. He was completely aware that he was being vague, and also that the threat was a laughably empty one. He downed the rest of his drink. "I swear to God. One day."

"Try not to. That could have unfavorable consequences." Suzaku threw him an odd look, and Lelouch shrugged. "Regardless. I suppose this isn't a man you can bargain with?"

"Not this man, no." He shook his head and left a fifty, not bothering to wait for change. "Sorry to tear myself away like this."

"It's fine." Lelouch tilted his head and offered him a parting smile, and it put him at ease – just a little bit. "I'll see you next time."

Wasn't that a sure thing, Suzaku found himself thinking. Rubbing at his eyes, he left the bar. When he pushed the door open, the breeze outside was cold, clean and clear, and a part of him actually seemed to hate it for that.

========== 0

Author's (end) notes: Thanks for reading. The review-link is your friend :D.


	2. you know right away

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

========== 0

_**(3) 'A Hard Day's Night'**_

Pushing open the door marked 'Homicide' at the end of the long corridor, Suzaku found himself practically blinded by fluorescent light. Squinting, he ducked his head and stifled a groan, and his temples throbbed in protest.

He might have sworn, but he wasn't sure in what language.

Luckily it seemed to be one Liliana didn't understand, and she looked up at him in surprise. Her fingers stalled over the keys of her typewriter. "Detective Kururugi!" She blinked and was on her feet in an instant, and she looked slightly surprised to see him - this soon, like this, or _at all_. "Is there anything I can - ?"

"Coffee," he cut her off, without entirely meaning to do so. The door clicked shut behind him. "Black." The secretary nodded at once and began to set about brewing a pot, and he added a weak "Thanks" to assuage his guilt.

"It's no problem," she assured him, wearing a small smile. "Detective Waldstein mentioned there was a chance you might not come back tonight anyway."

Good to know his boss had such faith in him. "Where is he?"

"He's gone home by now."

"…I meant the client."

"Oh!" Liliana flushed for a bit, before gesturing limply at the door to his office. "He just, ah...let himself in."

"It's alright," Suzaku sighed. He imagined as much, anyway. Eyeing the leggy blonde as she rummaged through the cupboard near her desk for some filter paper, he wondered why on earth she was still here at this time. Though, he supposed Bismarck must have given them the order, and she and Marika had drawn lots. Tough. "Thanks, again," he said, really meaning it this time. "I hope he wasn't rude to you."

Liliana merely smiled at that. "Oh no, far from it. He was very polite."

And Suzaku wasn't entirely sure why that soured him.

His office (along with the man currently sitting in it, he reminded himself) sat between Gino's and the large common room they all used, which doubled as a study and lounge and faced the main entrance to the department. He ignored it completely and paced the small hallway the _other_ way as he waited for the coffee to brew. Luciano's door was locked - this was a good thing, _always_ a good thing, in his mind, but Nonette's -

The door was ajar, only slightly, but that was enough for him to catch a glimpse of the girl sitting in one of the chairs in front of Nonette's massive desk. Training and his own sharp eye allowed him to take in all of her features in just two seconds: long, wavy hair that ended in soft curls at the tips, near her waist. Pale hands and long fingers (these, clasping and unclasping the hem of her feathery skirt), face as cute as a button. Eyes were like lilac, and they were apprehensive as she looked at the floor and bit down on a glossy bottom lip.

Suzaku retraced his steps without speaking, although a part of him might have wanted to. He came upon Liliana watching the coffee maker intently. "Who is she?"

The secretary rummaged through several folders on her desk before handing one to him: "Euphemia li Britannia," she murmured in a low voice. "Third Princess. Client brought her along."

He thumbed it open. "Witness or potential suspect?"

"Both, for now." Suzaku looked up, and Liliana smiled apologetically. "She hasn't given her statement yet."

It took awhile for the meaning of that to settle in. "...No."

"He said this way, you would be 'killing two birds with one stone,'...or something." Liliana faltered, probably from the look on his face (he didn't want to know for himself). "He said you could interview her after speaking with him. And he'd be willing to wait."

"No shit." Suzaku stole a glance at the clock: it was a quarter to ten, now, and with that knowledge, even the pleasant smell of brewing coffee failed to lift his mood. Barely two hours until the next day and he'd already been handed another hour's worth of work for _this_ one, not to mention however long the client wanted to speak with him...

"Don't worry about it." He didn't even notice that Gino had already come in until he was already _here_, hovering behind him with an arm on his shoulder. He was twirling Suzaku's keys in his other hand, and he hoped the blond had enough sense to not have parked his car anywhere inconvenient. Or illegal. "I can do it. Give me the file."

Suzaku frowned. "Gino, I don't think - "

"We're just taking her statement, right? That's all she's here for?" At Liliana's nod, he grinned and cheerfully plucked the folder from Suzaku's grasp. "Buy me another beer next time we're at _Arthur's Castle_ and we'll call it even."

In any other circumstances he might have been mildly annoyed, but right now Gino's sincere smile and reassuring grip only conjured a bleary sense of gratitude. "Are you sure?"

"I'm better at this than you are anyway," he teased lightly. He took a hold of the pot as soon as it was done, found Suzaku's blue mug among the half-dozen others on a tray, and poured in half of the coffee. "Go talk to our client. He's been dying to see you."

If only he _would_, Suzaku thought dimly. He took a sip without blowing or holding his breath, and the coffee scorched his tongue and the roof of his mouth well before the bitterness gave him the necessary kick: this was really happening. Gino gave him a final wink and ruffled his hair - like a dog, he supposed - and bounced off to Nonette's office, taking the half-full pot with him.

Gino was gone and this was really happening. God help him.

Armed with little more than a cup of coffee and his client's personal file, Suzaku made his way into his office with all the temperament of a man about to be hanged.

He wasn't surprised at all to find the man comfortably seated in his chair. Impeccably dressed (as _always_) he was toying with a wooden box in his hands and didn't even meet Suzaku's eyes as he came in. "Detective Kururugi. It's been awhile."

The man's rich voice cut through the air around him and made it sing. No, perhaps _now_ was the point which shredded all his hope and denial, when Suzaku didn't know, for a split second, how to answer. So he invariably ended up choosing the response that hurt the most: setting his coffee precariously onto an empty space on a bookshelf, he waited until the door was closed before dropping to one knee, a hand on his heart and "Your Highness" forced through clenched teeth.

To his credit, Schneizel el Britannia didn't burst out laughing at that, nor did his lips curl into a sneer before letting a snort slip through. No, he was always more refined than that, favoring nuance when vulgarities would have worked just as well: "Please rise, Detective. If I'd wanted anything involving you on your knees, we wouldn't be having this conversation - or _any_, for that matter."

Suzaku pretended he didn't feel as though he'd been punched in the gut.

But he'd been effectively given an order, hadn't he? Doing as he was told, he stood up to his full height and noticed Schneizel finally looking at him now, through narrowed slits of violet eyes. He turned away, resisting the urge to scoff. This was the second time he'd seen violet eyes today, and yet while the pianist's (Lelouch's, his mind corrected) were similarly alluring, they were warm - these were the exact opposite. "If you insist, Prince Schneizel."

"Oh come now," the man chuckled. "You don't have to be so formal around me. I'd think that men with history like you and I do would be more comfortable with one another than this, wouldn't you agree? Suzaku-kun?"

Suzaku grimaced at that. "Please don't call me that."

An elegant eyebrow was raised in amusement. "Pardon me. Am I pronouncing it wrong?"

"Yes," he lied. Reclaiming his coffee, he walked over and sank into one of the other chairs facing Schneizel. He wasn't about to start something by requesting that the man move away. "Did your business meeting go well?"

"Well enough," the Prince hummed, without batting an eyelid. (So it had been true then, at least as far as he could tell. But Schneizel was an excellent liar, and he needed no reminders of that.) "In any case, I hope you'll excuse that I'm taking up your time like this. Clearly these aren't office hours anymore."

"It's fine," Suzaku bit out, reaching across his desk and taking his fountain pen.

"Cigar?" Schneizel was still wearing that small smile, and now held out the wooden box before him. He opened it and ran a finger along the edge, describing its contents in a nonchalant tone: "Palmitas from the _La Gloria Cubana_ line. These were a particular favorite of my brother's, though, I prefer their Dalias myself."

Suzaku frowned. "I quit," he said. Another lie.

"Oh? Well then you'll have to present them to Detective Waldstein on my behalf." He chuckled, closing the box and sliding it across the top of the desk, until it came to rest neatly beside a stack of case files (_this_ case's files). "It amazes me how much can change in a span of four years."

He wondered if he was being baited.

"You found the body, is that right?" Suzaku opened the folder on his lap and detached the first page, using the blank space on the back for his notes.

Schneizel nodded, and steepled his fingers together. "A little after five-thirty in the evening. Dinner was about to be served."

"What was the occasion?"

"My sister Guinevere's engagement." So far, so good, Suzaku thought to himself, matching that up against previous testimonies. Not that he'd been expecting anything else. "To say that she was positively distraught would be an understatement."

"You don't sound as much, yourself," Suzaku murmured, without thinking. _Shit_. Was he not completely sober _yet_? Picking up his coffee, he took a long sip to clear his head and distracted himself by scribbling: _'First Princess engaged; not invited to wedding.'_

"On a cerebral level, I'm not. It looked to be a painless death, which is at least something we can find solace in." Schneizel leaned back, adjusting his gloves with a closed expression. "He looked to be at peace - in fact, his countenance reminded me of General Calares, actually. Calm and serene in death."

At the name, Suzaku's grip tightened around his pen.

He waited a beat, another, before letting out his breath. "And what were you doing in the dining room?"

Schneizel looked away. "I already told you, it was around dinner time."

"According to this you found the body alone." Suzaku flipped through pages upon pages of cross-statements, all saying more or less the same thing. "Now I don't know the protocol of fancy affairs like this, but I'm willing to guess it was either the servants were supposed to bring the food to _you_, or you were all going to move to the dining room when the time came. Either way, you pulled yourself away from the crowd." He looked up from the file, and met the Prince's scowl. "What happened there?"

But then the scowl dissolved into a wide grin. "I've no regrets - this job suits you, Detective Kururugi."

Suzaku flushed. "Answer the question, please. Your Highness."

Schneizel rolled his eyes (and he even managed to make _this_ look dignified) with a sigh. "Why do I feel as though I am being interrogated? I was the one who hired you to find my brother's killer, no?"

"Doesn't mean you aren't on our suspect list." And he was rather high up on that list, now that Schneizel was just a formality away from becoming the new Crown Prince. At the man's narrowed eyes, he averted his gaze and shrugged. "I'm only doing my job."

"Indeed, and how diligently so. Perhaps _this_ is the career you were born for, Kururugi. It certainly has more glamor to it than, say, getting shot at in mud trenches in France, wouldn't you agree?"

Suzaku's vision darkened, and the walls of the room seemed to close in on him. Schneizel had always had a way with words, and now he could _almost_ hear the gunfire ringing in the back of his mind. He squashed the vestiges of that memory down through sheer will and realized, perhaps Schneizel had had no plans of talking about the case from the get-go. "Have you really come all this way at such a late hour to mock me," he asked tightly, "Your Highness?"

"Mock you?" Schneizel looked as though he'd never considered it. "Whatever for? You were a hero - "

"I was your _scapegoat_," he ground out in a strained voice, clutching the end of the page and not realizing he was crumpling it.

" - Who saved my brother Clovis from certain disinheritance." Schneizel finished languidly as though he'd never been interrupted, once again inspecting his gloves with a trained, perfect detachment. "With General Calares and all the higher-ranking officers themselves killed that day, there was no-one else to blame for the failure of that mission. You understand, don't you? Someone had to take the fall."

"But I wasn't..." Suzaku struggled to get anything out after that, ultimately failing. It was hard enough just to breathe.

Because he wasn't the one who ordered those men to charge. He wasn't the one who waved away conflicting intelligence reports and led their whole squadron into what would turn out to be heavily-guarded enemy terrain. He wasn't the one who waited, from the safety of the barracks, as four hundred men walked right into their deaths.

_He wasn't the one who got them all killed, men he'd served with for four years. Because he was with them on the field, one of the twenty-odd men who'd survived. It wasn't until he woke up two days later, bleeding and delirious and hauled by one of his subordinates under a fallen bridge, that he learned that the barracks had been bombed and there was no-one left to report to. _

_The day the war ended, Paris broke out in cheers and revelry on the streets. And Major Suzaku Kururugi, who was recommended for promotion that year, had to attend his court-martial._

"Whoever heard of a lieutenant colonel at twenty-three, anyway?" Schneizel mused. "Some of the men were already talking amongst themselves, did you know? Spreading rumors. Some of them were untrue." His lips turned up in a wry smile. "_Some_."

That didn't matter to him. None of it did, anymore. And he never would have imagined, five years ago, that he would be saying these words to _one_ man and completely meaning them, with every fiber of his being. "You ruined my life." But things changed.

Schneizel spared him a look. "I got you an honorable discharge, and a comfortable job that _didn't_ involve going out everyday and wondering if you would come back alive. Some would call that 'generous'." And then, just as quickly, he was staring at the bookshelf in Suzaku's office, completely disinterested. "As for your earlier question: I don't know. Perhaps I was hungry, or perhaps I wanted to extract myself from an endless conversation with one of the many noblemen's daughters who had been invited to attend that night. I can't remember, and I honestly don't know."

Suzaku carefully took aside the part of him that was still fuming, still bitter, and locked it in a corner of his mind. _Things changed_, and perhaps long ago, the universe decided that if ever it was going to cater to the whims of a master, it certainly wasn't going to be _him_. Not in this lifetime. "You don't know," he echoed dully, staring at creases across the margin.

"Feel free to write that down if you wish." Schneizel sighed, checked his fine golden watch that glittered obscenely in the dim office, and moved to rise. "No, I don't suspect anyone in particular, and no I have nothing more to say. My brother Odysseus was a simple man, and he had no enemies that I know of. I do wish I could give you more to work on, but that is the best I have to offer. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe it's about time for me to collect Euphy."

Suzaku didn't write it down, and he didn't move even as Schneizel was already on his feet, making his way to the door. He did, however, notice when Schneizel made a detour, and when he felt a heavy gloved hand on his shoulder, he tensed and looked up.

"Why me?" he asked sharply. "You could have hired any detective in Pendragon."

Schneizel laughed at that, actually laughed. "Because." And then, in a matter wholly unbefitting of the Second (no, _Crown_) Prince of the Empire, he braced both of his hands on the back of Suzaku's chair, effectively trapping him there before he could react, and leaned in very, very close. "Because you hate me." He smelled of champagne, fine and sweet. "You suspect me. And because these two facts are additive, Detective, I know for sure that you'll spare no effort in finding every shred of evidence there is against me." Then he pulled back; he seemed so much taller this way, and his eyes glittered as he looked down. "But I am innocent, and so I trust that with the diligence you are bound to pour into this exercise in futility, you _will_ deliver the killer to me."

Suzaku hadn't moved, hadn't blinked, hadn't taken a breath (because he'd smelled champagne, and he'd been read _so_ easily) by the time Schneizel let himself out of the office.

"Good night, Detective."

And when the door finally clicked shut he let out a shuddering breath, reached for his coffee and chugged it all the way down. It was bitter as hell, and his eyes watered, but when he slammed the empty mug back down onto the desk, threatening to shatter it, his hand was no longer shaking.

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Author's (end) notes: I wish I had a Gino where I worked. For real.

Um…thanks for reading and reviews would be loved? :D


	3. won't end well

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(4) 'I Had the Craziest Dream'**_

When he could no longer hear Schneizel's footsteps through the door to his office, it wasn't a moment too soon.

Still, there were parts of him that were less than rational, and Suzaku found himself waiting a few more minutes before he finally decided that hiding out in his office forever was not a viable option. He rubbed his eyes, suddenly wanting for more light - he wasn't certain why the sheer blackness afforded by his window suddenly unsettled him. He needed light. And more coffee, perhaps.

Liliana was still dutifully filing papers at her desk when he pushed open the door, an empty mug and his own senseless apprehension in tow. But a pair of muffled voices drifting from Gino's office stopped him mid-stride. "They're still at it?"

The secretary barely glanced up. "I believe so." Her tone was carefully neutral. "Maybe she's being difficult?"

"Gino will get through," Suzaku muttered. That wasn't what he was concerned about, though, and he supposed the quick glance he cast around the lobby betrayed him completely. "What about the prince?"

"Waiting for her outside, in his car." Snapping a stack of papers together with a thick rubber band, Liliana took a long look at him without any particular expression on her face. "More coffee, Detective?" she asked, reaching for his mug.

Suzaku stole a look at the time and sighed guiltily, letting her have it. "You're a godsend," he told her. "You know that?"

He caught a glimpse of a shy smile then, but she lowered her eyes and turned away before showing him anything else. "I try."

While the coffee was brewing, Suzaku left the woman to her work and walked back to his office, passing it and stopping just before the threshold to Gino's. The coat rack was on the way, and rummaging through one of the many pockets of his trench coat rewarded him with the pack of cigarettes he kept there; it was only when he already had one between his lips, however, that he realized he couldn't find his lighter.

"I'm sorry, but I really don't remember that." Euphemia's voice drifted easily through the door. It was sweet, and clear as a bell - it reminded him of Shirley's, now that he thought of it, although there was less of the waitress' casual valley-girl charm and more of a different kind, the refined, lilting tones he'd come to associate with society's upper crust. "You'll have to forgive me, I'm being terribly unhelpful."

"No, not at all!" How Gino managed to sound so enthusiastic and cheerful at this hour was beyond him. "I understand this can be difficult, your Highness. Maybe, once the shock clears - "

"Oh, but it isn't that." Euphemia sounded so earnest that she never did catch on to that faux pas, but Gino graciously let her continue without bringing it up. "It's just...well, we were in a celebratory mood that night. Spirits were so high. And...well..."

Suzaku _got_ it a few seconds before Gino did; he wondered what that said about him. "I understand. You said 'spirits', your Highness?" the blond eventually said, amusement thick in his voice.

Gino must have smiled at her then, or wiggled his eyebrows in that way of his which could bring even Anya to crack a smirk, because Euphemia let out a little laugh. It may as well have had notes to it, muffled into either handkerchief or palm, elegant as the rest of her. "I'll admit I had quite a bit of champagne."

"I imagine everyone did," Gino humored her with a chuckle. "But I'm afraid you've put me into a bit of a bind, dear princess. I'd hate to have to write up a charge for underage drinking."

"Pardon me, _Detective_." But she didn't sound the least bit offended, not at all. "I am twenty-six."

"You don't say!" And Suzaku could just imagine Gino's comically wide eyes, the broad smile teasing at the corners, and he smirked around his cigarette at how _easy_ the blond made it all sound. "My sincerest apologies, your Highness. I honestly thought you were at least eight years younger."

"Oh, stop it." Euphemia laughed openly now, and in his mind's eye she now looked nothing like the delicate, almost frightened subject he'd seen in Nonette's office less than an hour ago. "You clearly haven't looked at my file, have you?"

"Guilty as charged," Gino laughed. "In my defense, I've come to learn that speaking with the subjects themselves is always so much more enlightening than just reading the things written about them."

Suzaku found himself smiling at that, and he was almost sorry to put an abrupt end to the exchange. But he'd kept Gino here long enough, he convinced himself, and he broke the spell with a series of swift knocks on the wooden door.

"Ah, please excuse me for a moment, princess."

When Gino joined him in the hallway, Liliana was already pouring the coffee.

"Hey there." He was still grinning, as expected. But Suzaku had known Gino long enough to recognize the exhaustion in his eyes, and that the latter failed to hide it completely tonight was already rather telling. "All done with our client?"

"He's outside," Suzaku nodded, deciding not to elaborate anymore. "And you? How's that coming along?"

"Like digging a tunnel with a toothpick," Gino sighed, although he never lost his smile. Thankfully, he'd shut the door behind him and had enough sense to speak in a murmur. "I've tried every trick in the book, and then some. She either really knows _nothing_, or just isn't willing to tell us."

"Well if you can't break her, then I guess I have no hope either." Suzaku chewed a bit on the cigarette, tasting paper. "Want me to try anyway?"

Gino laughed heartily. "I take it our client bored you?"

Suzaku shook his head; if only he could grasp just how _wrong_ that was. "Anyway, I'm done now, so I can pick up from here. If you head out now, you might still - "

"What?" Gino was squinting at him. "No, I told you, I've got this."

"But don't you want to go home?" He must have been chewing on the cigarette again, because in the blink of an eye Gino had plucked it out of his mouth and tossed it into the trash can just outside the common room. "Hey!"

"Quit that. You shouldn't even have those on you anyway."

Suzaku rolled his eyes. "I told you, I'll quit when I'm thirty."

The blond perked up. "Ooh. Is that a promise?"

Hell would freeze over first. "Gino - "

"Look, why can't you ever just let someone do you a favor? I told you I'd do it, and I told you it's okay. Seriously, you're not going to get bad karma for life by letting me be _nice_ to you."

A protest would have been automatic - rather, it _should_ have been, but that carefree statement hit just a bit too close to home. "I already owe you a drink," he mumbled, staring at the floor.

"And I'm looking forward to that!" Gino skipped over to the front desk and finally took the cup of coffee from Liliana's hands. "All right, if you really want to make it up to me..." He pretended to think about it for awhile. "Stick around for a bit. I should be done in an hour tops, so wait for me, okay?"

Suzaku shrugged. "It's not like I'm going anywhere," he admitted. That conversation with Schneizel proved just how much the alcohol was _still_ lingering in his system. He doubted he would have fared much better if he'd been completely sober, though...no, maybe this had been the best outcome.

"I love how you say things like that with a straight face." Then, without further ado, Gino took a generous sip of his coffee before all but forcing the mug into Suzaku's grasp. "Okay, wish me luck!"

Suzaku watched him disappear through his door. He had scarcely done so when the voices and laughter began again.

He sighed. Returning to his own office, he sank into his chair (the leather was cold, now, and thank God for that) and loosened his tie. He brought out the thick folder Bismarck had given him and saw something new - a thin envelope had been placed beside it, and there was a note scribbled in pencil across the flap:

_'Yours. - A.A.'_

Suzaku spent maybe a few minutes trying to concentrate on his work, all the while trying _not_ to let his gaze trail back to the box of cigars still sitting innocuously on his desk. After the fifth straight failure, though, he gave up: taking the folder, Anya's envelope, and a legal pad in one arm, he drained his coffee and left his office, nudging the door to the common room open with his foot.

Here, the lights were a bit brighter, and there was a small sofa beside a coffee table that had seen better days. Leafing through their suspects' testimonies was an arduous task, especially since there were _so_ many of them. He jotted down notes on the pad - which statements corroborated which, whose alibis checked out, and whose would have to repay close study. The ruled lines on the paper soon became a mere suggestion, and upon reaching the end of the first page he took one glance at his work and hoped this would still be legible to him in the morning.

One page turned into two, two into three, and the clock above the bookshelf ticked on.

Suzaku paused when he came upon Schneizel's name. Stumbling upon Odysseus' body was one thing, but the Second Prince hadn't given him a good reason as to why he had wound up _there_ in the first place. It was hard to imagine Schneizel wandering his brother's home without any purpose, not when he was the same Schneizel who made even the tiniest of gestures seem deliberate. Calculated.

_'Not enough information,'_ he eventually scrawled. Oh, Bismarck was going to be thrilled with this, he thought dryly. That, and it meant he would eventually have to speak with Schneizel again. He wondered if he could ask anyone else - but the only one he could think of was Gino, and he really didn't want to owe the man any more favors.

There was that, too. Now that they were two rooms away he could no longer hear them, but if Gino didn't extract any useful information from the Third Princess soon, he realized he may have to write the exact same thing next to Euphemia's name.

Sighing, he pushed the half-finished folder away, casting a weary glance at the clock. Just past midnight; he wished he had more coffee.

Suzaku reached for the envelope as he toed off his shoes. The sofa was hard, lumpy in some places, and was only a two-seater - not nearly long enough for his height. He squirmed as one of the armrests dug into the base of his neck, and his lower legs hung awkwardly off the other one. Comfort was a relative thing.

He took out the envelope's contents and tossed it back onto the coffee table; it bounced once and ended up on the floor anyway.

Anya was always consistent with her shots, not a single one out of focus or wanting for contrast. She'd taken photos of the corpse from five different angles: still, not a single defensive wound visible in any one. There were other things, as well - he spied the spot of red on the fabric he'd shown her, as well as a smudge on the lower pane of the window that he'd missed. The curtains didn't seem to be disturbed, but neither did the rest of the room, although a small amount of ashes sitting in the ashtray atop the buffet may have swayed opinion.

Suzaku shut his eyes and put the photos away without getting up; scrutinizing them against the light may not have been his best of ideas today. This was what he had on his hands: a high-profile murder, perhaps the worst of its kind in recent history. This would be _all over_ the news by tomorrow evening, at the latest.

_Too many suspects, entirely too many people with motive and opportunity. Any one of them in that house could have picked up a knife. And yet, little to no evidence left behind - what was that? How was that even possible?_

In spite of all the coffee, he might have drifted off.

He _must_ have, because in what seemed to be no time at all he was facing Schneizel again: a slightly younger Schneizel with cropped hair and a colonel's uniform, speaking of things like _'unforeseen consequences'_ and _'sheer irresponsibility'_, and the need to _'punish all guilty parties'_, no matter what.

(And then the prince had finally smiled, his violet eyes drawn into sinister slits as he reached out an arm. But it wasn't Suzaku's gun he was going for.)

Suzaku bolted awake with a curse.

And perhaps there really was no end to this, he thought bitterly, sitting upright with his head in his hands. Pins and needles ran up his legs, and he tried to will these away along with the ache at the back of his neck.

Eventually, he just learned to deal.

It was almost two hours since he'd last looked at the clock.

Liliana was gone, and the lobby was shrouded in darkness. Walking next door to Gino's office, he saw that Euphemia must have left as well. He felt guilty when he saw Gino sprawled over his desk, an arm thrown carelessly over his eyes and the other dangling off the edge, a mess of paperwork he'd kicked off littering the floor near his feet. There was no way that position was comfortable, he thought with a shake of his head, although the blond's insistent snoring might have begged to differ.

(A couple of years ago, Gino insisted on sleeping with the lights on. Before Suzaku could open his mouth, Gino had grinned and told him he could ask again in the morning. He never did.)

He found his car keys eventually, sitting in the same bowl in which Gino kept his own, by the lamp. He scribbled a note on the back of an old receipt and taped it there, wondering at which point he'd stopped regretting certain things, such as what he was about to do now.

Perhaps the universe was enabling him, though, as he hadn't taken two steps out of the building before he saw his car right there, pulled up with the front bumper almost kissing the foot of the concrete stairs. There was no other vehicle in sight.

Between the nightmares and the bitterly cold air, Suzaku knew this was as sober as he was ever going to get. As he switched on the ignition, he glanced at the moon through the smoke and the clouds, and wondered if he could make it to _Arthur's Castle_ in time for last call.

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_**(5) 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes **_

When Suzaku eventually reached _Arthur's Castle_ again, it was almost three in the morning.

The 'Closed' sign was the first thing he noticed, and the sight of it was so much more crushing than it should have been. Sighing, Suzaku parked right near the entrance and shut off his headlights, fumbling in his glove compartment and almost (_almost_) praying for a lighter.

Some higher power must have decided to take pity on him, because there it was, stowed among maps and old paperbacks. Finally lighting up a cigarette, he tossed the instrument back in and cranked his window open.

But the early morning breeze, chillier than he'd expected, carried with it something else.

He frowned, rolling the window back up and exiting the car completely. He waited there after the door clicked shut, and craned his neck.

There was no mistaking it this time. Unless he'd finally gone mad, that really was piano music drifting out from within _Arthur's Castle_.

Suzaku wasn't sure what possessed him to actually make his way towards the bar, ignoring the clearly prohibitive sign and following instead the feeble blur of light from the window, or the strains of piano music growing steadily louder as he approached. Though it was the latter, he supposed, that caused him to linger at the doorway.

He knew this song, he realized. It took a while for him to wrap his head around the melody, but this was - what was this? This was that song he'd heard at the school auditorium almost ten years ago. Someone from the school board had invited a famous violinist and his wife to perform. Maybe, one of the faculty had suggested, exposing the youth of the nation to cultured things like arts and classical music would improve their chances of turning out straight; he could almost imagine how that conversation went, and bit back a chuckle around his cigarette.

Still, he remembered this song, though his recollection might only have been as cloudy as the smoke rising up from his lips, vanishing too soon. Back then, the couple had performed it as a duet - the man, playing a series of notes that didn't seem to resolve until his wife, on the piano, played a response. They did this again, another series of _wait_ and _play_ until before Suzaku realized it, they were playing together, and this introduction made the passage they finally played in unison all the more meaningful.

This was different, though - the pianist would play the full chord for what would have been the violin, and softer, lighter tones for the rest. Sometimes the song would dip in volume, and Suzaku would have to strain his ears, before a sudden crescendo threw him off. And then the pianist would shift to a lower key, and Suzaku was left wondering if he was listening to the same song at all.

But it had to be, he convinced himself, thinking it through when the song became so soft he could no longer hear it. _Lovers_, he'd thought of it the first time: a pair of lovers, a boy in the courtyard and the girl at the balcony, him asking a question and her gracing that with a reply - Suzaku shook his head and _squashed_ that errant thought, biting into the cigarette with a scowl. Where the hell had _that_ come from?

Perhaps a better question was, why had it resurfaced so easily, even after all this time? But that was more difficult to answer, and he ground into the cigarette harder with his teeth when the mere thought began to lead to other things.

The door being yanked open from the inside, however, snapped him out of his brooding.

Suzaku glanced up and saw the pianist in front of him before he could really be surprised, but that didn't stop his spine from stiffening, or an emphatic "Jesus _Christ_" from flying out of his lips.

"Can I help you," Lelouch leaned against the doorjamb and narrowed his eyes somewhat, "Detective?"

Suzaku shook his head, again. "I'm sorry, I...didn't mean to disturb you."

Lelouch peered at him. "Forgive me if I think that having a stranger loitering around the front of the bar at witching hour is more than a _little_ disturbing, no matter what you did or didn't mean."

"Ah." Suzaku flushed, eyeing the concrete beneath their feet. He really should have left the moment the music stopped; he wondered how it would look if he just left now. "You could see me?"

"Just your silhouette, through the door." The pianist nodded at the pane of glass fixed into the wood at eye-level on the door, the same one Suzaku had pushed through night after night without really paying it much attention. "It was rather unnerving."

"I really am sorry," he said. "I wasn't thinking. I was just..." 'Enchanted by the music' would have been the truth, but Suzaku wasn't about to admit it now. That would just be humiliating. "I guess I just wanted a drink." That...at least, was also true, and less humiliating. But he supposed it wasn't by much.

Lelouch studied him for a long, hard moment, the crease of his eyebrows sharp and unforgiving. Eventually, though, the tension left his frame as he shifted against the door, and he finally settled into a smirk. "Last call was almost two hours ago," he said matter-of-factly. "Rivalz and the rest have gone home."

Suzaku eyed the darkness over the bar, the glasses hanging clean and empty over the counter, and blew out a puff of smoke, careful to turn away from the pianist. "I see."

"And I distinctly recall you'd put away quite a lot before leaving." Lelouch hummed thoughtfully before craning his neck to look past Suzaku's shoulder. He squinted. "Is that your car? Did you drive here?"

But Suzaku's mind, be it because of the smoke, or the earlier vodka, or some other possibility - something about Lelouch's presence, something he didn't want to dwell on - was still several steps back and struggling to catch up. "Wait, if everyone's gone..." He glanced up. "Why are you still here?"

Lelouch raised his eyebrows. "I believe I still have an unanswered question that needs to be resolved, no?"

"Oh..." Suzaku glanced once at his car, then back at Lelouch. Wasn't it obvious? And besides, at this point he wasn't even sorry anymore, and he wondered _why_ that no longer worried him, either. "Are you going to hold me hostage to that question all night?" he joked instead.

"What an odd suggestion," Lelouch laughed. "I could always just shut the door in your face."

This banter was quickly becoming tiring. "You could," he conceded with a shrug.

"Hmmm." And for a moment he thought Lelouch would do just that. But then: "Did you want to come in?"

"...What?" Suzaku looked up, trying to clear his muddled thoughts. None of this was making much sense, although he supposed on some level, the pianist derived amusement from this conversation. Maybe that was all it was to him.

It was probably worth it, though, he realized in hindsight. Despite the godforsaken hour, Lelouch actually looked less tired than he had earlier at the bar, though Suzaku wasn't sure if it was just the lighting that made all the difference. It could be. Still, he couldn't help but think that the other man's smile looked genuine now, how he seemed much more at ease.

"You look like you had a rough night." The pianist's voice was soft when he suggested this, and there was something that shone in his eyes - for only a moment, before he pushed himself off the jamb and braced a hand meaningfully around the door frame. "Well?"

Suzaku decided he probably ought to just take this for what it was. "What'll it cost me?" he chuckled, meeting the pianist's eyes once more.

An elegant shrug of slim shoulders preceded Lelouch squinting once again, this time focusing his gaze somewhere in the vicinity of Suzaku's mouth. "I suppose I could use a smoke," he said, after an eternity.

"That...can be arranged," Suzaku murmured, after much thought. He'd already closed a hand around the pack in his coat, and was about to draw it out, when he realized he'd left the lighter in his car. "Hang on, I don't have a - "

He never got to finish that sentence, because he'd scarcely looked up when Lelouch leaned forward, plucked the lit cigarette out of his lips and nonchalantly placed it between his own.

And then, before Suzaku could even react, the pianist had already taken a long drag, blowing a stream of smoke up towards the sky as he crushed the cigarette underfoot. "Good enough," he smiled, shooting the stunned detective a single look before holding the door wide open. "Come on."

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Author's (end) notes: Internet cookies to whoever can identify the song Lelouch was playing on the piano. Also, guys! **orange_kitty521 **did a gorgeous art piece for this fic, check my profile for the magical link!

As always, thanks for reading ^_^. Reviews would be better-than-vodka!


	4. others

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(6) 'Blue Moon'**_

Walking into an empty bar at 3 in the morning felt surreal, though not quite as much as having your cigarette stolen and smoked in front of you by a man you barely knew. In any case, the pianist had made no further comment as they entered, and Suzaku wasn't in the best of mental states to discern whether or not that gesture was supposed to mean anything. 'One cigarette isn't the end of the world,' was what his mind eventually settled on, a conclusion that required little effort, and in turn was borderline-useless.

"How did the late-night meeting go?" Lelouch asked.

Suzaku had to think about it for a bit. "Badly," he replied, hanging up his trenchcoat as usual on the rack by the door. He'd left his hat in the car. "Though, I guess it could have been worse."

"Mmm, the way we console ourselves. Sentences that begin with 'at least,' and fancying more misfortunes. People don't often realize that can go both ways; it's quite telling." Lelouch moved more quickly than Suzaku had anticipated, and was now standing behind the counter. He was rolling his sleeves up further, clearing his elbows, when he asked, "Did you still want that drink?"

Suzaku walked up to him, amused. "This after you gave me a hard time for driving here?"

Lelouch smirked. "I wasn't judging you." He ran his hands under the tap at the sink opposite the wine rack. "I was simply asking a question."

The sad thing was, he couldn't really argue with this - not out of some odd form of courtesy, but rather because he could no longer remember how that exchange had gone, in verbatim. "It's fine," he said instead. "I don't want to trouble you any more than I already have."

"I'm already here," Lelouch murmured, wiping his hands on a dish towel.

_Another_ one of these conversations. Perfect. "But you were at the piano..." And the lack of music was an unfortunate thing, especially when his ears had been filled with it just minutes prior. It only added to his guilt.

(Then again, very little _wouldn't_.)

Lelouch glanced back at the piano, as though humoring him. "She won't miss me as much as you'd think," he chuckled. "Now," he leaned forward and propped his arms against the counter, letting his hands dangle, "I'm not _nearly_ as good at this as Rivalz is, but I'll try. Pick your poison."

Suzaku looked at him curiously. Despite the caveat, Lelouch never once lost that air of confidence he always seemed to have about him, and it came out sounding less like an apology and more like a challenge. The man had seemed familiar enough with his drinks during their earlier conversation, but textbook knowledge was just that. He didn't want to embarrass him, or give him a hard time. "Surprise me, I guess?"

"From anyone else, that would be helpful." Lelouch rolled his eyes. "From _you_, that only translates to 'anything but a vodka gimlet'."

"...Valid point," Suzaku conceded, unable to bite back a chuckle. "I guess I haven't been ordering anything else, have I?"

"After Rivalz realized you would drop in like clockwork, he started adding water and lime to a bottle of vodka and just freezing it overnight. It saves him the trouble of having to strain out ice, and it gets you your drink quick, strong, and impossibly cold." Lelouch quirked his eyebrows a bit, before quickly adding, "Don't tell him I told you."

"Huh." Suzaku smiled at the revelation. He never imagined the bartender, who was always either pining for Millay or sulking about some misfortune or another, would have taken the extra effort for his sake. He supposed it also spoke of how close they were to one another, these people who worked at the bar. He would have envied that, on some level, but he wasn't sure if that kind of atmosphere would translate well to his line of work. "Then I guess I should tip him more."

"He'd welcome that. Nonetheless, your fondness for that cocktail is almost disturbing."

Suzaku shrugged. "It's familiar," he reasoned.

"And comforting, I suppose. Routine being the closest thing to an anchor the moment we move away from our homes." He would have responded to that (he wasn't sure how) but the pianist moved to kneel and disappeared from view. Rummaging through the area below the counter, Lelouch eventually emerged with a collins glass and a muddling spoon. "Have you ever had anything else?"

This question, at least, he didn't have to think about so much. "Sometimes. They used to give us screwdrivers to mix things up a bit." He decided to continue before Lelouch asked who 'they' referred to. "And we used to have white Russians every Sunday in the - at my old job. Tradition. My roommate's brother, whenever he comes over - he makes this great cocktail with triple sec." He had to pause for a short laugh, remembering all the ludicrous excuses he and Naoto would come up with to get Kallen out of the apartment for a few hours, just so they could have a drink in peace. "_Kamikaze_, it's called."

"I see." While he was speaking (or, he supposed in retrospect, _rambling_ was probably more accurate), Lelouch brought up several more items from various places behind the counter, the last being half of the ice from a tray of cubes that now found themselves in the glass. "You have a love affair with vodka, it seems."

Suzaku laughed again. "I like it just fine. But..." He noted the general bleariness of his vision, the slight buzz in his head that still had not gone away despite coffee and sleep. "I guess the feeling isn't mutual."

Lelouch nodded to that. "It rarely is."

"And you?" he pressed. The martini he'd bought for him, he recalled now, had been the pianist's second one that night. "Are you a gin man?"

A flash of a smile. "On occasion."

Lelouch really wasn't quite as good at this, at least as far as skill was concerned. To be fair, he wasn't dropping or spilling anything, but he was more cautious with his movements, much more cautious. He actually used a jigger to measure things before pouring them into the glass, and this was the only time Suzaku ever found out that this bar even _had_ one - Rivalz would always just pour by eye. And Rivalz, as far as he recalled, no longer bothered to check the labels on the bottles as he worked, knowing these by heart as well.

The pianist, on the other hand, was double-checking each one, which was made more obvious by _how many_ times he did this. Suzaku blinked. He could see none of the labels from here, but those were a lot of different bottles. Just how many alcohols was he putting in there?

"Was any of that gin?" he ended up asking, as yet another splash of clear liquid went in.

"There's vodka in it," Lelouch said, which didn't answer his question. He brought out another bottle this time, smaller and oddly-shaped. It contained a bright blue liqueur, and after a stall in the jigger it diffused through the mixture quickly, turning it blue as well.

Suzaku found himself transfixed by the color, but he did notice Lelouch flipping the jigger over and adding some sort of mixer. He then topped up the glass with clear soda and began to stir.

"Surprised, Detective?"

"That and curious." Suzaku peered at the drink. "What's it called?"

"I can't tell you that." As he glanced up, Lelouch offered only a bemused grin. "It's vulgar."

He took out two lowball glasses and poured half of the mixture in each, holding the ice back with the muddling spoon.

"Slowly," Lelouch warned him. There was a pointed look in his eyes when Suzaku reached for his glass. "Don't do your usual chug and slam."

"Thanks," Suzaku said dryly. He watched Lelouch take a small sip and did the same: it was somewhat sweet and slightly sour, _much_ smoother than he'd been expecting. "Hmmm."

"Well?"

"It's good." He took another sip and held the glass a bit over the counter, swirling. There wasn't any ice to watch, he remembered belatedly, but the electric blue was really enough of a treat for the eyes. "Though, if you don't tell me what it is, I'm not sure how I'm going to pay for it."

"Consider it on the house. It's the least we can do for your patronage." Lelouch's eyes were glittering as he held his drink with one hand and used the other to transfer everything else from the counter to the sink. He let the water run for a few seconds before nodding at the detective, taking another sip. "Speaking of which. I still have a debt to repay."

Suzaku followed him; he'd been given no instruction to do so, but he supposed that was unnecessary. He didn't quite understand, though, until he realized they were walking to the piano. "I suppose this is something you're better at than Rivalz, right?" he joked.

Lelouch smiled, taking one last sip before seating himself at the piano. He placed the glass on top, and it looked barely touched. "I still owe you a song," he reminded, ghosting his fingers over the keys. "Now would be the best time to collect, in my opinion."

"Is this why you're here at this time?" Suzaku asked, after giving it some thought. "Because it's quiet?"

"There's a big difference between music in an otherwise quiet room, and music having to compete with voices and footsteps and ten thousand other little sounds, certainly." Lelouch slid his hand across and tapped his little finger against the very last key, but he didn't depress it enough to make a sound. "Rivalz trusts me enough with the bar. I just lock up whenever I go."

"I see." Here Suzaku was almost tempted to ask _where_ the pianist would go; he hadn't seen any other vehicles when he'd arrived, though he supposed there might be more space behind the bar. And the pianist could always live close by. "That's nice of him."

"It is," Lelouch agreed. Then he sat up straight and cracked his knuckles. "Tell me your preference, Detective. Something mellow? Romantic? Or perhaps something more uplifting?"

Suzaku pulled up a chair from the nearest table and sat on it, careful not to spill his drink the entire time. He thought of the corpse they'd found, that unpleasant encounter with Schneizel and the creeping knowledge that this, _this_, would be the crux of his life for the next few weeks. Or months. "Uplifting, definitely," he decided, a wry smile on his face. "Play me something that will make me feel alive." (_For once_ went unsaid.)

Lelouch nodded. He seemed pleased with the idea. "All right."

The pianist launched into the piece with very little by way of introduction; he began playing as though he'd ripped the song straight out of the air.

By the time he was truly able to catch on, there was a build-up of some sort - a break in the rhythm, notes that went steadily higher as Lelouch's hands crossed the piano almost completely - and then it was back, a whimsical sequence mirrored by a smirk on the pianist's face. His right hand stalled on the same note before returning to a melody that resolved only to repeat itself, Lelouch sliding his hands deliberately over the keys they crossed and playing an octave lower.

It was - 'playful' was probably the best word Suzaku could come up with to describe it. Lelouch would play those high notes that Suzaku would imagine water must _wish_ it sounded like, trickling from the edge of a glass or through fingertips, before the song would shift to a lower key that more closely resembled rainfall, heavy and loud. But all of it was _playful_, fast-paced but not frantic - or perhaps it was only Lelouch who made it look so effortless, with his fingers dancing across the keys, even as he had to shift his hands between beats. The song was all light and energetic, perhaps even a tad mischievous - Suzaku would give in to the urge and tap his fingers in time across the back of the chair, only for the tempo to change within several notes - if he could call it that.

Near the end of the song, though, Suzaku found himself no longer looking at the piano, or at the hands flying over it. Lelouch had a small smile frozen on his face, and as he played his eyes were shining. Sometimes he would tilt his head, ever so slightly, when the notes went down accordingly, leading to a new measure; other times, he would linger on the same note, usually a high one, and he would actually _blink_ in time.

He made an enchanting sight, though Suzaku didn't admit this to himself until he realized he couldn't look away.

"Joplin," Lelouch finally said, as he ended the song. He kept his fingers depressed on the last keys for several seconds, before finally lifting them. "Personally I think ragtime pieces sound better on these vertical pianos," he commented, "but you're free to disagree."

"That was wonderful," Suzaku said, and he meant it. He would have wanted to clap, but he had nowhere to set down his drink, and it would just be awkward after that. "Thanks, by the way."

Lelouch tipped his head. "You're welcome to it."

"Totally worth the drink." Suzaku grinned. "How long have you been playing?"

"Hmmm." Lelouch placed his hands on his lap and squinted a bit, pondering the question. "I started when I was six. Though, I didn't actually enjoy it until much later."

"But you played anyway?"

He shrugged. "Sometimes parents are very hard to refuse. But sometimes, they also turn out to be right in the end."

Suzaku truly didn't know what to say to that for a very long time.

Thankfully, he was spared by the sound of the phone ringing, from the bar. And while he couldn't quite help but jump slightly - it was a shrill, jarring sound, and who in the world would be calling at 3 in the morning? - Lelouch only lost his smile, and his features hardened a bit before he turned away. "Excuse me."

Suzaku took another sip as Lelouch left. Although he could tell there was alcohol in it, the drink was still sweet and smooth, just like before. Snorting, he ignored Lelouch's previous instruction and downed the rest in a single swallow, _finally_ feeling the kick only when his eyes met the ceiling and the phone stopped halfway into its fifth ring.

He couldn't hear Lelouch from this part of the bar, he realized, straining his ear for the man's voice and left wanting. He didn't want to think it could be Gino, finally awake and checking up on him; he imagined it might be Rivalz, or someone else from the bar who knew Lelouch was here. Or a wrong number, perhaps.

He sighed, closing and opening his eyes. The world suddenly seemed - hazier, somewhat.

And he wasn't quite sure what to do with himself, now that he'd lost both the pianist _and_ the rest of his drink. Should he just let himself out? But that would be rude, he chastised himself, especially after Lelouch had accommodated him so much. He supposed he could make his way to the other man and give a proper goodbye, but he didn't want to risk being seen as eavesdropping, or stumbling into a private conversation.

Damn common courtesy, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut once again. A dull throb in the back of his head forced them open once more.

For entirely too long he debated on how to relieve himself of this idleness without somehow seeming impolite.

He wasn't sure how that ended with him sitting at the piano himself.

Suzaku placed his empty glass carefully beside Lelouch's, and then he stared at the keys for several minutes. He didn't know nearly enough about the instrument - he couldn't read notes if his life depended on it, and he wasn't blessed with enough raw talent to play pieces by ear after hearing them once or twice. But he knew enough, just barely enough to find music interesting, or at least a worthwhile pursuit.

To be precise, he knew part of exactly _one_ piece, and nothing else.

The keys felt cold and hard, unwelcoming to his hands. Tentatively, he pressed down on one key, swearing at how loud the sound was. It was the wrong one.

He found the correct key after several more false starts.

And then...

(This was his problem, and this was why his solution of choice was always temporary at best and doomed to fail: for all that he wished he could, Suzaku never quite _forgot_.)

It was a miracle he remembered how to do the accompaniment at all; it was so much easier ten years ago, when he'd counted 'one-two-three' in his head and tried desperately not to fumble under an intent, adoring stare, cursing himself for even thinking it was a good idea.

(_"What's your name?...'Suzaku'?" A giggle. "You're not from Pendragon, are you?"_)

Now, he _did_ fumble, just a bit when the song required a quick series of notes in one count - he knew because the sound he made didn't match the one in his mind.

(_"My mother says she doesn't want me seeing you." That same giggle, but less childish this time: "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."_)

He was playing it slowly, he thought, more slowly than he should. He'd practiced against a metronome then, stopping with every mistake and starting from the very beginning each time. He'd glanced at the calendar furiously every day, because he had to master it - or at least, be able to play it competently - by the end of May.

But again, that was ten years ago.

(_"You're really going through with this? But I thought...you promised..."_)

Suzaku hesitated a bit before that high note - it was a big jump, and he figured if he messed it up, the rest of the song may as well go to hell.

(_"I love you so much. Promise me you'll come back alive."_)

But he got it right, somehow. And the rest of that measure followed like an afterthought.

"Chopin," he suddenly heard Lelouch murmur behind him. Suzaku glanced up then, but he wasn't quite surprised. He wondered why that was so. "Sorry," the pianist smiled, settling into the chair Suzaku had vacated. "Continue, please."

Suzaku imagined he should have felt nervous, now that Lelouch was watching him. But he didn't, and he didn't stop playing even though, at this point, he really wanted to.

(_"And when you're done and the war is over, we'll get married. ...No, I'll wait. I'll wait."_)

The second part wasn't technically that much harder - the basic melody was the same, albeit with a few more embellishments here and there. Suzaku swallowed and stared resolutely at his hands, at the keys. Although he didn't miss any notes, he suddenly felt very clumsy. As though it would only be a matter of time.

(_"Here's something you might already know: every letter I send to you is sealed with a kiss. It's a cliché, I know. But this way, you owe me a kiss for every letter I send, so keep track! And I might add on some interest."_)

By the time he had to stall over those notes, rapid and repeated, he thought his hand might be shaking.

"What's her name?"

"Who?" he barely had the presence of mind to ask.

Suzaku wasn't looking, but he could sense the smile in Lelouch's voice when he clarified: "The name of the lucky woman you learned this for."

His hands froze.

(_"Dear Suzaku: I'm writing this letter to congratulate you on your recent promotion. Being a Lieutenant must be a lot of work, and we're all proud of you. ...Suzaku, we've always been honest with each other..."_)

He was at that note again: that same note, the one that required a ridiculous leap across the keys (a leap of faith, every time), that one note that could make or break this particular piece - her favorite.

God damn it all.

There was a beat. Another.

And then, Lelouch leaned over, found the right key, and pressed it.

It took Suzaku less than a second to finish the measure.

"I don't know the rest," he said quietly, as soon as he did. But his hands felt like lead over the keys, and he didn't take them off just yet.

It had been ten years since he learned it, stubbornly watching Kaguya and applying it himself, from brute force and persistent repetition. But he ended up playing it several times, roughly once every few years when something (like this) came up. He never quite forgot.

"...Here." He didn't register Lelouch sliding onto the bench next to him, but he tensed up and shrank back when - "No, don't move."

The slight urgency in the order was the only thing that enabled Suzaku to follow it, and he forced himself to keep still when Lelouch slid his hands underneath, coaxed his wrists up and gently pushed each of his fingers between Suzaku's and the corresponding keys.

"Good god, it's a piano, not Pandora's box." Lelouch chuckled and Suzaku looked away then, but he amended that with a shake of his head, and a smile. "Relax. All right. Here we go."

Lelouch eased into the next part of the song by lifting Suzaku's hands and fingers along with his. This was the part Suzaku had never really bothered to learn, because it started off too somber, (those few measures sounded too much like 'goodbye'; it hurt), and then continued with too many accidentals before reverting back to the core melody, with even more embellishments that he couldn't perform in time.

And as Suzaku watched their fingers move over the piano, in tandem, it came to a point where he could barely hear the music anymore, where the hard lines between the keys began to blur and all he could register was Lelouch, _Lelouch's hands_, the warmth from his skin and the faint scent of his cologne, the taste of vodka and God-knew what else creeping back up his throat.

He swallowed, harder this time, and his eyes watered.

Or maybe they didn't.

The world spun, and for an awful moment he felt as though he were floating; the next, as though he were falling off the bench.

But then Lelouch brought his hands down hard - _con forza_, he dimly recalled Kaguya's business-like tone, so silly with her then-childlike voice - and Suzaku tore himself away from the piano.

There was no grace in the desperate maneuver - only a frantic clanging of keys, his limbs tangled and then forcibly _un_tangled from Lelouch's, a shaky breath - and then he was standing several feet away, the small of his back pressed against the edge of the nearest table.

"I'm sorry," he gasped. "I...I didn't mean to..."

(To what? He never finished.)

Lelouch had managed to stay composed on the bench, but his eyes were wide with surprise. "Detective?"

"It's Suzaku," he replied, without really thinking. And then, he _heard_ himself, and remembered what had just happened. Heat flooded his cheeks. Mother of _God_ - "I - I can't stay. I'm sorry. I really...I need to..."

Suzaku was stumbling for the door, and then outside, before he could finish _that_, too. Politeness be damned.

It took a dozen tries to get the damn key into the ignition, but when he did, he sped out of there as soon as he could shift gears. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, and every so often he would glance up at the mirror, as though (oddly) expecting to see Lelouch there, in the back seat.

He shivered, and that was when he realized he'd left his coat at the bar.

It was also then that he realized he had veered onto the wrong side of the road.

Suzaku swore and slammed on the brakes, entirely out of instinct - there was no-one else on the road. The whiplash from that was horrible; it sent a dull ache through his chest and bile rising up his throat. It took too long to recover, too long - he was sweating, but it was _cold_ and he'd left Lelouch without an explanation and he couldn't understand anything about _anything_. He tasted salt. Nothing was making sense.

He waited until he'd recovered enough to actually drive again, and then he pulled over, slowly, to the other side of the road.

The world swam the moment he stepped out of his car.

What the _hell_ had been in that drink?

Stumbling half-blind, he spied the telephone booth; it was an oasis in the middle of the desert.

There were only two numbers he knew by heart: one would connect him to Gino, if he was still at the office. He could imagine the blond would drop whatever he was doing to get to him, and when he did he wouldn't even ask any questions. He would crack _one_ joke about it at work when it was safe, and then never bring it up again.

That wasn't what he wanted, and it definitely wasn't what he deserved. Suzaku stuffed coin after coin blindly into the slot until he got it right, and then shakily dialled home.

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Author's (end) notes: For the curious, the pieces featured in this segment were Joplin's _Maple Leaf Rag_ and Chopin's _Nocturne op.9 no.2_. The piece Lelouch was playing in (5) was Schubert's _Serenade_ / _Schwanengesang_ / I'm not actually sure what the title is.

But, um…this fic has a playlist now? (Link will be in the usual place!)

Reviews would be more awesome than 4-hand piano :D.


	5. it takes time

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(7) 'Why Don't You Do Right?'**_

The worst mornings were those following nights in which you didn't even remember going to sleep at all.

Suzaku was awake long before he opened his eyes, and it was by no means a quick, painless process. He couldn't feel any of his limbs until he moved them - at which he _did_, and immediately wished he hadn't. Someone may as well have jammed a screwdriver (not the kind with orange juice, no; he would have _welcomed_ that) in his right ear, and every tiny sound sent it a bit further in.

Where was he last night? He vaguely remembered Schneizel, Gino, driving back to the bar and then Lelouch, but it was all muddled and broken in his head. He assumed he must have left the bar - shit, had he crashed and wound up in the hospital?

It would explain a lot. It would also explain, maybe, all this shuffling beside him, soft footsteps and little clicks and thuds that were amplified and translated as _pain_. Last night must have been a trainwreck, he thought hazily, although he did remember one thing rather clearly: piano music, notes drifting lazily through his mind. The perky sounds of a ragtime and -

He felt a soft, smooth hand on his forehead, and if he wasn't so out of it he might have leaned into the touch. The hand then swept back, brushing away some of the hair that had been in his eyes to rest atop his head.

Wait a minute...

_"Life could be a dream, sweetheart..."_

Suzaku cracked open his eyes just in time to see the horn of the gramophone right at his ear, and the _other_ hand twisting the volume knob quickly all the way to the right.

Oh God no -

_**"SH-BOOM! SH-BOOM! Ya-da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da - !"**_

"Fucking fuck fuck _fuck_," he swore eloquently, gritting his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut. He tried to squirm away, but the hand on his head held fast and tugged meaningfully on the hair it had ensnared. Suzaku winced, one eye forced right back open on instinct. "Wait, ow - "

"Good morning!" his roommate of almost four years, Kallen Kouzuki, announced. Her voice was entirely too chipper, too high-pitched, and they both knew it was deliberate. "That's right..." She smiled sweetly and Suzaku saw the bulb of his own copper light suddenly come into view, close enough to block out her face. "This is happening."

Suzaku yelled and thrashed, swearing in Japanese. Kallen let him go, and he shot up to a sitting position much faster than he should have, and he finally, _finally_ woke up.

At the price of pain came clarity - that strange blue drink, Lelouch's hands guiding his on the piano before he'd (panicked) bolted, and then...a phone call. He could no longer remember where or when, or what Kallen had said over the phone; the next thing he recalled was her stepping out of a cab, and she'd done little else but throw on a pair of heels and a flimsy raincoat over her nightgown. _"Keys,"_ was all she'd seethed at him then, and he'd given them up without comment before allowing her to haul him by his collar and shove him into the passenger's seat of his own car.

Everything else eluded him at this point.

"Mature," he muttered, rubbing at his temples. "What are you, five?"

"Effective," Kallen shot back, switching off the flashlight and tossing it his way. He barely caught it in time. "So. Should I punch you in the face now or later?"

Suzaku shrugged. His head throbbed, and despite the somber grey seeping in through the slits between his blinds, he felt entirely too warm; the prickly, relentless heat felt like a rash on his skin, like early August afternoons back in Japan. "Eh."

A right hook to the chin later, he realized she was actually serious.

"_Ow_," he hissed, reeling. He blinked once, twice, gripped the window ledge while waiting for the spots in his vision to stop mocking him. "Okay. I'm alive," he announced, to no-one in particular.

"That," Kallen declared, folding her arms across her chest, "was for making me come out and drag your sorry ass back home at freaking four in the morning."

"Sorry," he sighed, and meant it. Now that the initial shock had passed, even this blasted hangover wasn't quite enough to stave off the guilt that was creeping in. "I wasn't - for the love of God, _turn that off_."

He shot a murderous glare at the gramophone. Kallen rolled her eyes, but she did as she was told, and the overly-perky quartet was halted in the middle of singing their litany of 'if only's. "Continue," she said.

"I wasn't thinking last night," he muttered, avoiding her eyes and staring at the sheets underneath him. Despite her obvious resentment, Kallen had apparently been considerate enough to drag him all the way to his bed. He was missing his tie, he noted, although when he was just starting to wonder where his coat was, he realized he'd _left it at the bar_. Spectacular. "But. Thanks."

"Unaccepted," Kallen snapped. "This doesn't change the fact - "

"Lower," Suzaku winced, motioning with his hand.

She huffed, annoyed, before acquiescing and switching back to her normal pitch. "This doesn't change the fact that you're a supreme idiot." She took the flashlight back from him, but instead of setting it back on his desk she merely waved it at him emphatically as she went on. "You have a problem. Say it."

He groaned. _Here we go_. "I do not. Last night was me being stupid. It won't happen again."

"Please. Do you even believe what you just said?" Kallen's glare and harsh tone were both softened, somewhat, when she brought up a mug of steaming hot coffee; he didn't even notice it had been sitting on his desk until she was already offering it to him. "You looked like shit, by the way," she said, finally breaking into a semi-genuine smile.

He took the cup from her hands, breathing in the aroma. It helped clear his head, if only a bit. "Thanks."

"You still do, actually," she added.

"Hmm." Suzaku took a sip and stared at the coffee that remained. Kallen always added just enough sugar to take the edge of bitterness away, and then not a single grain more. She wasn't like Liliana, who would always make it too sweet unless you told her otherwise. Or Marika, who never made coffee at all. Out of nowhere he wondered how Rivalz made coffee...or _Lelouch_, for that matter, his mind drawing up memories of that 3 a.m. cocktail which landed him in this predicament in the first place. And: everything that followed. "Kallen," he began, suddenly pensive. Because he also remembered Lelouch at the piano, how close he'd been and how he'd told Suzaku to _relax_, how that entire melody was interspersed with recollections of - "Was I...was I saying anything, this morning?"

She thought about it for a bit. "Yeah...yeah, you kept going on about never having any of 'that glow-in-the-dark horse-piss again'." Her lips quirked. "Was that important?"

He laughed at that, honestly and openly, and laughed again when she betrayed herself with a snicker. All things considered, this morning could have been so much worse; the last one like this had him waking up in Millay's apartment on the south side of town, with the lounge singer wearing nothing but his shirt and last night's makeup as she asked him how he liked his eggs. The one before that had an unfamiliar hotel room - he nearly gave Gino a black eye before his brain could catch up. And the one before _that_...

Suzaku felt something unpleasant rising up in his throat, and when he realized it was too late to force memories of _that_ morning back down he barely had time to set his coffee on the windowsill, push Kallen away and stumble madly for the bathroom.

The mirrors were all fogged up, the interior still warm and smelling of coconut as it always did after Kallen took a shower. Somehow this only made it _worse_, but when he finally dropped to his knees in front of the toilet and gagged, nothing came out.

It took several more false starts, dry-heaving until his eyes watered and he ended up coughing, before Kallen walked in after him. She lingered at the door, joking, "Pregnant?" with an amused smile.

"You're just looking for an excuse to push me down the stairs."

"Harsh," Kallen raised her eyebrows. "No filter yet?"

"No filter yet." He grimaced, waving a hand in front of his face. "Sorry. What time is it?"

She glanced at the clock hanging in the small foyer. "Just a bit past ten."

If he didn't already know he was going to be chewed out by Bismarck today no matter what he did from the get-go, Suzaku might have panicked at that. "Why aren't you at work yet?" he asked instead, throwing her a puzzled look.

"Oh, but I am, in a way." After squinting at her in a way that hopefully expressed how he didn't _do_ irony with a hangover, Kallen tossed a rolled-up newspaper at him. "Here, hot off the press."

Suzaku caught it and flipped through the pages; they weren't still stuck together slightly at the edges, and faint smudges in the bottom corners indicated they had clearly been skimmed through. It wasn't surprising, though: three-quarters of the front page had been devoted to a single snapshot, of a very familiar mansion with police tape across the perimeter. The rest of it was taken up by a dramatic headline in bold, black letters.

"_'Britannian Crown Prince, Murdered at 42'_." Kallen didn't have to read it from the paper to recite it word-for-word. "You know, I wasn't even aware he was that old; were you?"

But that was the least of Suzaku's concerns right now. "Goddamn it," he muttered. He'd completely forgotten about the press. With most of the nausea now gone (if only because he had to pay attention to _more important_ things), Suzaku pushed himself to his feet. He flushed the toilet absentmindedly, completely forgetting that it was still empty, and flipped to page 2.

The Pendragon _Pioneer_ was notorious for its anti-Imperial slant, and naturally employed only the most fearless reporters from the capital. Kallen certainly fit that mould very well, although she was more often penning columns for the Opinion section than out in the field tracking stories. She wrote under several aliases, random monikers like 'Q-1' or 'Crimson Lotus'; she reserved her rather transparent pseudonym, 'Karen Stadtfeld', for her rare news pieces, such as this one staring him in the face right now.

Then again, it wasn't hard to imagine all of the other major newspapers and tabloids would have the exact same story splashed all over their front pages today.

"_'First Prince Odysseus eu Britannia was found murdered in his home in Pendragon by local officials at close to 6:00 p.m. yesterday evening'_," Suzaku read aloud, navigating his way to the kitchen. Despite the three-page spread, very little of the story had to do with the murder itself, most of the text instead offering short highlights of Odysseus' life and testimonies from his family and friends on how he'd spent his last days. "Very informative," he called back.

Kallen, who was trailing behind him, made a face before snatching the paper back. "It's not like you'll find anything better from the other guys'. They weren't exactly letting any reporters past those damn police lines."

And it wasn't as if the investigators themselves had that much information to begin with, but he kept that thought to himself. Suzaku shrugged, letting her go on as he filled the kitchen sink with cold water, immersing his head when it was almost full. He didn't bother shutting off the tap.

The sheer cold suddenly flooding his senses was the final catalyst that brought him to full alertness.

"Wait a minute, is that why you're here?" Suzaku shook the wet hair out of his eyes as soon as he resurfaced, and Kallen wrinkled her nose at him. She'd fished out her pair of reading glasses, and was now frowning at the droplets of water that had splashed onto the lenses. "Ried give you a day off for getting that story out before press time?"

He hoped to whatever God was listening that the answer was 'yes.' But of course it couldn't be that simple, and sure enough Kallen was shaking her head as she wiped the lenses down with the front of her blouse. "This is going to be a continuing story, and it'll probably keep us busy for at least the next few weeks. So I convinced Diethard: surely, keeping one its key players from getting robbed and waylaid in the middle of town, and _then_ making sure he doesn't kill himself from alcohol poisoning, would be worth a paid day off, right?"

Suzaku groaned, and he ground his knuckles into his eyelids. "You were at the crime scene, then?" he sighed, wondering if this day could get any worse.

Kallen snorted. "Of course not. They weren't letting anyone into the _courtyard_, so why would I...?" She faltered, however, when she noticed his eyes on her, and the very pointed question he didn't need to ask aloud. If anything, her guilty laugh only promised more bad news. "Hah, um. So. I may have...I called Weinberg," she eventually gave up, cringing at her own admission.

"You what? _When_?" Gino had been with him the whole day yesterday, except...oh. "Never mind," he said, quickly shaking his head. "I figured it out. 'Haliburton file', my ass," he grumbled, finally remembering to shut off the water and pull the plug from the drain.

"All he told me was that you're the primary," Kallen insisted. "Nothing else. So don't go gutting him today, okay?"

"I couldn't even if I wanted to," he sighed guiltily.

"Besides," she pushed past him, emptying the coffee pot into her own mug and leaving the former nonchalantly in the sink. He supposed that meant he was on dish duty today. "I needed to explain why Gottwald _isn't_ in charge of the murder investigation, as he should be."

He _should_ be, Suzaku echoed that last part in his head. He wondered how Kallen would react if he told her his appointment by Schneizel had probably been done entirely out of amusement. That would be even more of a riot to -

He froze.

"Wait a minute." Suzaku glanced up, sharply. "What did you just say?"

Kallen didn't even look at him. "I said, I needed to explain - "

She yelped when he grabbed the paper back, skimming the first two pages furiously. He didn't find anything there, but the story continued on page 14 and...

There it was, a small box on the upper right-hand corner of page 15, a hundred-word or so blurb that promised untold misery for the entirety of this case. "You didn't," he growled, plucking the reading glasses from her and putting them on anyway; squinting at the small print was only making his headache worse. "Oh, you didn't... _'Leading the investigation is Suzaku Kururugi, 28, of - '_" He paused, and fixed her with a scowl. "Really?"

Kallen shrugged, murmuring into her coffee. "Rakshata was going on about how a former colleague of hers did a study that found sticking odd numbers in the middle of a printed sentence would throw people off more than if they were even. Besides, does it matter?"

"I'll try not to be offended," he grumbled, returning to the page. Water from his hair was dripping onto the paper, leaving it wrinkled and spotted. "..._'of Camelot Investigations, a local'... 'Kururugi served four years in Europe in the war against'_..." He looked up at her, horrified. "This is so unnecessary!"

"This is the murder of the _century_," Kallen emphasized. "The people want to know who's who, what's what, and which is which every single step of this investigation. Hell, Diethard wanted the names and bios of _everybody_ from your agency - he only backed off when I told him there wasn't enough time for that."

"I guess I don't mind being thrown under the bus nearly as much as I should," Suzaku admitted, glaring miserably at the inset without really reading it. Thankfully, Kallen's editor hadn't asked for an accompanying photo, and - aside from a brief mention of his military service - the text was relatively benign. The last sentence, offset and printed in boldface, asked for the public's cooperation, and anyone with any information was directed to the number to his office. "I'm almost surprised you didn't give them our street address," he sighed, handing the paper and glasses back to her.

She took them from him gracefully. "Scared?" she asked, only the slightest hint of teasing in her voice.

"Not really." Having his name displayed so prominently in the _Pioneer_ meant it would make its way to every other newspaper in Pendragon within the day, if it wasn't there already. While it gave potential witnesses an easy way to contact him - and, who was he kidding, he needed all the help he can get - it also made him a walking target to anyone who may want this case to remain unsolved. It was always a tricky balance like that, but if anything he was grateful it was just him, and not Monica or (dear God) _Anya_.

Which was just as well, he convinced himself as he rummaged through the fridge. Schneizel had sworn he was innocent (which counted for _nothing_), but even if he were, the likelihood was still high that the murderer was from the Royal Family, or someone very close to them. He imagined if that person really wanted to, they would have no trouble at all silencing him.

"So. Any leads yet?"

Suzaku rolled his eyes and withdrew the half-full carton of milk. "It's been less than twenty-four hours," he pointed out. He ended up shoving the fridge door shut with more force than he'd intended.

"True, but I'm pretty sure you've already started. That's why you were at the bar so late after all, right?"

He squinted at her. That had been partly true, at least. "I can't tell you anything right now," he finally said, prying open the spout with his fingers.

"That's bullshit," she frowned, nearly spilling her coffee. "Come on, the _one_ time living with you is actually useful to my career and you're going to ruin it?"

"Tell me where you hid the vodka I brought back last December."

Kallen seemed to mull it over...for a good five seconds, before making a face and letting out a frustrated groan. "I hate you sometimes."

"You love me the rest of the time," he countered, finally getting the spout open and taking a swig straight from the carton.

She rolled her eyes. "Well I have to talk to the landlord today." She poured the last third of her coffee down the drain and set the empty mug under the faucet, briefly rinsing her hands. "Because _one_ of us has to be responsible and _oh my God use a glass_. You pig."

He merely shrugged at her, still drinking, and she threw her hands up in the air, stalking out of the kitchen.

But she ended up stalling at the threshold, and when she turned back to face him her eyes were completely serious.

"I'll tell you one thing, though," she began. "Last night? Can't happen again. Don't tell me anything if you really can't, but get your act together. All of Britannia's watching."

Suzaku mulled over those words as he watched her leave, taking in the rhythmic click of her heels against the hardwood.

Because she was right, of course. He _did_ have the murder of the century to solve. Granted, Gino and the others would undoubtedly provide some much-needed help along the way, but the onus was entirely on him to see this through. The press would be watching and relaying to the public his every last move, and Britannia (had she meant the country or the family? he wondered, before realizing _it didn't matter_) would be shadowing his every step.

Simply put, he had his work cut out of him. And all of this nonsense that had been occupying his mind - of Schneizel and Paris, of old flames and perfumed letters written in gorgeous cursive, and of potent cocktails and a pianist with his haunting music at 3 in the morning - _all_ of this, he would have to suppress (if not banish completely) from now on.

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Author's (end) notes: As always, all music featured in a segment can be found in the playlist (this one had two!) linked in my profile.

I'm sorry if this chapter is strange. I am very sick and that may or may not explain things =(.

But, thanks for reading! Reviews would be loved, very much so :D. (Next chapter: actual work will be done XD).


	6. for disaster

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(8) 'A Day in the Life'**_

Of course a day that started off strangely was bound to get only _stranger_, as evidenced by the mob of people crowded around the entrance to his office building.

Suzaku made a U-turn and parked at a careful distance, almost an entire block down the street, before returning on foot. There must have been three dozen of them or so, swarming around the stairs and spilling onto the sidewalk. But before he could register what was going on, he finally caught sight of Bismarck, at the top of the stairs and seemingly at the center of the swarm.

He stopped in his tracks when the larger man spotted him and, with a glare forced through a smile in mid-conversation, jerked his head almost imperceptibly to the back.

Ah. _Reporters_, Suzaku's mind finally supplied, taking in the well-dressed mob armed with either cameras or pad and pen. News certainly did travel fast, if these people were here for what he _thought_ they were here for. There was always a chance he was wrong, but the warning in Bismarck's eyes had been clear; what would be more topical, anyway, than the murder of the Crown Prince, and its investigation? And it had not even been eighteen hours, at that.

Deciding not to put too much thought into that - or at least, not _here_, where someone would inevitably recognize him as part of the agency - Suzaku resumed walking quickly, following Bismarck's gesture to the rusted iron gate closing off the narrow alley at the side of the building. It was locked, of course, so he didn't bother trying to get through the traditional way: using a nearby trash bin for a boost, he hoisted himself onto and over the top of the gate.

No sooner had he landed on the other side, and kicked up a bit of a dust storm from under the worn-out soles of his shoes, than he heard the grating sound of a window opening overhead, and: "Pssst!"

Suzaku glanced up to see Gino waving at him, his blond head sticking out of the second-storey window. He squinted. "What?"

"What do you mean, 'what'? Come on!" Gino pushed the window open further, until it yielded as much open space as possible. "Don't want you to be eaten alive on your first day on the case!"

He frowned. "Do they even know what I look like?"

"They know they're looking for 'Suzaku Kururugi'. It's not hard." Gino peered at him meaningfully, before pulling back and flashing a grin. "So are you coming up or are you staying there all day?"

Suzaku shook his head. The previous owner of the building, it seemed, had been terrified of this particular street, and so the rear entrance had not only several deadbolts on the inside, but a heavy chain and padlock securing the door on the outside. That owner had then left the country without leaving them the key or an explanation, but perhaps the fact that Bismarck never bothered to have the chain cut was telling. _He_ never offered an explanation either. "I can't believe I'm doing this," Suzaku muttered, stuffing his wallet as far as it would go into his pocket and setting his key ring between his teeth before crouching, and lunging for the ladder of the fire escape.

He managed to catch the bottom rung and one of the stringers on his first try, which wasn't too bad, considering he wasn't nearly as active as he used to be. He pulled himself up by his arms and struggled to brace his feet against something solid; in retrospect, this would have been so much harder with his coat on, so maybe that counted for something?

"Ooh, one for one." Gino whooped and stood there still grinning like an idiot for entirely too long before finally helping him the rest of the way. He then pulled Suzaku all the way into the window without further ado, smiling all the time. "I should have brought Anya up here with me. That was priceless."

"You would do that," Suzaku sighed, pocketing his keys once more. The second floor of the building had been sold as a separate unit, and a buyer was found just last month. Right now it was just undeveloped office space, empty rooms in off-white with protruding naked wires and that persistent smell of paint. He'd often wondered who the buyer was; he did so now, until his mind remembered it had far more important things to dwell on. "I can't believe you told Kallen I was on this case," he growled, shoving Gino away from him.

It was a half-hearted gesture, though, so Gino merely laughed. "Hey, it was bound to come out eventually! I just gave her a few hours' headstart."

"You realize that story made today's _Pioneer_, and is probably the reason we have so many reporters swarming the building before noon, right?"

Gino shrugged. "It's going to be like that everyday from now on, you know!"

That was true, Suzaku realized, and it was by no means a comforting thought.

It was still lingering when they made their way down the stairs, and Gino pushed open the door with a jubilant "Look what I found!" to whoever was in the lobby. In this instance, it happened to be Marika, taking over the morning shift, and none other than Luciano, pouring himself a cup of coffee from what smelled like a freshly-brewed pot.

Knowing the other detective, this was going to be like tar, but he supposed he needed that today.

"Detective Kururugi!" Luciano greeted, flashing a smile that was slightly too wide and widened even further when he glanced at the clock. "Late again, tsk. Is this going to be a habit?"

"Save it," Suzaku mumbled, reaching for the pot anyway. "I was here until three." (Or was it two? He couldn't really remember anymore.)

"I can vouch for that," Gino chimed in, finally appearing at his side after greeting the secretary. But Luciano had already turned and disappeared into his own office.

"Speaking of which..." Suzaku paused to pour the coffee and used the momentary stall to study the other detective, who was still in yesterday's rumpled clothes. "Did you spend the night here?"

Gino turned to face him and offered only a simple smile. "Did you go back to the bar?"

Point taken. "Black, two sugars?" Suzaku conceded with a wry smile, reaching for Gino's mug.

"Dark as a kiss from the devil, and just as sweet." Gino laughed and waved a hand at Suzaku's raised eyebrow. "Oh, by the way: meeting at one."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, all hands on deck. Just pretend you know stuff and don't be late!"

Story of his life, he thought then, perhaps minus the part about not-being-late. Suzaku spent his lunch hour reviewing the notes he retrieved from the common room, courtesy of last night's less-than-sober scribbling, as well as the other materials he'd gathered pertaining to the case so far. Bismarck holding down the fort in the presence of that storm of reporters must have exhausted the man's quota of goodwill for the day, so there was no room for error now. Especially not when this case could make or break their agency, and everyone and his mother knew _which_ agency was conducting the investigation.

This was why, when asked immediately which way his suspicions pointed (after much glowering and less-than-vague hints about just how delicate the Britannia case was going to be) Suzaku only said, "None at the moment."

He learned it during his first week on this job, some three years ago: this early in the investigation, he wasn't _allowed_ to have very strong suspicions, or at least, he was supposed to set them aside and follow the evidence. Otherwise that meant the initial bias was too strong to treat the case objectively, which was unfortunate - all these thoughts about Schneizel, thoughts the _man himself_ had dragged out into the open, these would have to go.

(Or maybe it wasn't unfortunate; maybe it was the exact opposite.)

"There were two hundred guests at that party, all hand-picked by Princess Guinevere, her fiancé, or the Emperor himself." Nonette had the huge folder open in front of her on the long table.

"One ninety-nine." Monica, seated at the other end, had divided her copy of the paperwork into smaller folders, fanned out in front of her. She was holding up one, and frowning thoughtfully at something on the third page. "Princess Carline has been in Switzerland since last fall."

"So, _one_ name we can scratch off the list." Bismarck sighed, heavy and long. "And the staff?"

"Fifteen on duty full-time that night," Suzaku supplied, pulling out the rewritten copy of his notes and scanning through. "Thirty-four others working the shift Prince Odysseus was killed. People they brought in from the outside - caterers, musicians, decorators - sixteen. All of them had access to the dining room."

"And we're about a quarter of a way into the interrogation, _if_ that." Luciano was sitting with his legs propped up against the table, facing the open window. He hadn't brought anything along save for a coffee cup that was now empty, and a sharp letter opener he fiddled with in a slightly disturbing manner.

"...Maybe we're going about this the wrong way." Bismarck seemed deep in thought for a moment, before pushing his papers back and adjusting his glasses. (_'Want to know a secret? One of those is a glass eye. Bet you can't tell which!'_ had been the first he'd ever heard from his colleagues about their boss.) "All right," he finally said. "Let's do this by motive. Prince Odysseus dies. Who benefits?"

In the short silence that followed Suzaku wondered if _he_ was the one who had to say it, but Gino spared him the trouble: "The Second Prince inherits everything," he said simply, all while chewing a wad of gum.

"The Second Prince who hired us."

"Who hired _him_." Luciano brandished the letter-opener until the tip was pointing in Suzaku's direction; perhaps he only imagined the hint of resentment in the man's voice then, or at least that was what he told himself. "The rest of us were just dragged in by association."

"Cease and desist," Bismarck said tonelessly, by now used to this behavior. Sometimes he must have wondered how anyone here ever got any work done. The large man turned to him, his face grim and closed. "Has Prince Schneizel said anything?"

Suzaku sighed. He didn't need to refer to his notes to answer that question. "Our meeting wasn't really that conclusive." He came to gloat, bring up the past, and drop off some cigars. "He confirmed being there, and finding the body, but he couldn't give a good reason he was in the dining room in the first place."

"What do you mean, he 'couldn't give a good reason'?"

"He couldn't remember why he'd come to the dining room." Suzaku shrugged. "The way I see it," he continued, carefully adopting a neutral tone, "He's not in the clear yet."

This seemed to go over well with the others, though, and Bismarck looked at him for a long, hard while before giving a firm nod.

"But..." Suzaku returned to the file again - specifically, to the guest list, provided by Princess Guinevere's lady-in-waiting and written on stationery that was still reeking of perfume. He had to be _objective_ about this; he swore he wouldn't let his previous entanglement with Schneizel get in the way of... "What if we phrase the question another way? Instead of 'Who benefits when Odysseus dies?' let's say: Prince Schneizel becomes first in line to the throne. Who benefits?"

All five other pairs of eyes immediately scanned their own copies, Luciano craning his neck to get a look over Nonette's shoulder.

Monica gave it some thought. "Our victim was a pacifist, and rumors were going around that once he became Emperor, he'd implement some drastic downsizing for the military. On the other hand, wasn't Prince Schneizel himself a military man at one point?"

The way she and several others looked at him keenly then meant they must have already read the story, or at least heard about the details. Dammit Kallen, he thought to himself, responding with a nod and nothing more.

"Is there anyone in particular," Bismarck asked, "on this list, specifically among the people in doubt?"

"I can think of one," Nonette said, a prominent scowl on her face. "General Bartley was at that party, but he became completely uncooperative halfway through his statement." She folded her arms across her chest. "I was barely able to squeeze an alibi out of him, and it's shaky at best."

It took a while before he found _Bartley Asperius_ on the guest list, because the damn thing wasn't even alphabetically arranged. It was easier to find his official witness statement: _left early due to upset stomach._ Pleasant.

"I thought General Bartley was supposed to be in Lisbon," Bismarck frowned.

"He was," Nonette nodded briskly. "Apparently he got an emergency call back to Pendragon sometime near the end of last month."

"By whom?"

"Prince Schneizel."

It came every so often during discussions like this: the feeling that they were just going in circles, without any real leads to follow. Or, that an unimaginable number of people and factors had connived to ensure that the murder took place, and they were just hopeless laborers left behind with the mess, trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack that maybe had a dozen, all impossibly small.

"What about this guy?" Gino sat up straight and tapped against his folder, as though forgetting that no-one could see what he was looking at. "Dr. Asplund - if this is the same Dr. Asplund from Colchester, I remember reading once that he'd just started a project from a huge grant by Prince Schneizel himself."

Something about the name jarred Suzaku out of his musing. "Wait." He flipped through his own folder. "Asplund? Is that _Lloyd_ Asplund?"

"Yeah." Gino nodded, and then leaned over and helped Suzaku find the appropriate page. "He was a guest of the fiance. Came in half an hour late. His plus-one was his assistant, Cecile Croomy."

Some of the witnesses' statements came with photographs, either clippings from newspapers and magazines or precious few snapshots from Anya herself that night. This was one of the former, but even through the grainy newsprint he could see the flippant grin, the faded stains on his collar and the way his glasses were just the _slightest_ bit askew atop his nose.

"Why?" Gino pressed, suddenly curious. "Do you know him?"

_("Let's keep this between us, shall we Private Kururugi?" the bespectacled man drawled as he held the damning document up in front of him. The sound of tearing paper was entirely too loud in this closed office, and it seemed to go on forever until the report was in narrow, useless strips atop the desk. "What they don't know won't hurt them.")_

Suzaku shook his head, slowly. "What's this project on, do you know?"

"Top-secret stuff, I suppose. They never gave the specifics."

"And it's being funded by Prince Schneizel?" came Bismarck's voice.

"I think the point we're all missing here," Luciano cut in at that point, "is that our initial assumption may be wrong. We're treating Odysseus' murder like it's the end, and Schneizel becomes Emperor. Who's to say it isn't someone else down the line, eliminating the competition, and Schneizel's next?"

Nonette frowned. "So you're suggesting he's either a suspect, or a potential victim?"

"And everything else in between," Suzaku sighed. Much as he hated to admit it, to even _consider_ it, Luciano had a point. Watching Schneizel because he was under suspicion was one thing, but having to _protect_ him... "You really think so, though? What if you're, say, fifteenth in line? That's a lot of blood."

"Not to mention they're all still family - though, I'm not sure that means the same thing to royalty as it does to us." Gino chuckled, and deftly avoided the glance Suzaku sent his way. "So. What's thicker than blood?"

"More blood," Luciano smiled. Without warning, he leaned over with the letter opener and scored a thin line on Nonette's page, much to her chagrin. "So we focus on the top," he said, tapping at the paper meaningfully with the blade. "All of these royals are half-siblings, except for these two: princesses, Cornelia and Euphemia."

"Full sisters," Monica mused. "But that doesn't really mean anything, does it?"

"It doesn't," Luciano conceded, leaning back into his seat. "Any one of those could have done it, provided my theory's right. But those two in particular would have additional motive. I'd do it for me, or I'd do it for my sister." He shrugged. "I'm just saying. We need to start _somewhere_, and let's not kid ourselves. While keeping tabs on all of those civilians is a good idea, I bet you any money our culprit's last name starts with a B."

In a way, perhaps Luciano was just saying what they were _all_ thinking. Family ties in the Royal Family were complicated, to put it in the nicest possible way, with their patriarch, the Emperor, encouraging not the traditionally supportive family dynamic but rather a dog-eat-dog version that more closely resembled animals in the wild. Navigating this complex world within itself would be painful but necessary, if Luciano was correct.

And if Schneizel really _was_ innocent, and one of his half-siblings was the murderer, well - Suzaku could imagine him looking on impassively as that person was sent to the gallows, checking his watch and then rising from his seat the moment it was over.

"Princess Euphemia was here for questioning last night, wasn't she?" Bismarck looked at Suzaku expectantly. "How did that go?"

"Ah," Gino cut in for him. "Not so well. She confirmed she was at the party, but other than that she couldn't remember. I couldn't get anything from her."

Bismarck shot a puzzled frown over his glasses. "Why does nobody from this party seem to remember anything useful?"

Gino laughed good-naturedly. "Well, there _was_ a lot of alcohol. It's pretty surprising what that stuff will do to you sometimes!"

"I'll say," Suzaku muttered, recalling blue cocktails and a piano and warm hands and - he didn't even realize he'd said that aloud until all eyes in the room were on him. God damn it.

"Well," Bismarck sighed, closing the folder and fixing Suzaku with a serious gaze. "This is technically your call, Detective Kururugi. What do you want to do?"

What, indeed. Bismarck Waldstein was the head of Camelot Investigations, and Suzaku would always report to him. But since _he_ was the one hired to take the case, in times like this his input carried far more weight. That wasn't a good thing. "I'd like to do a sweep of the crime scene again," he said honestly, pushing the folder away and propping his arms atop the edge of the desk. "We collected almost no physical evidence, and I don't believe it's possible that that was all there was. I want to go back now that the place isn't crawling with cops and other people. Can we do that?"

"We can," Bismarck nodded, fishing for the small notebook he always kept in his shirt pocket. "We legally have the mansion cordoned off for 48 hours after the murder is reported, but I'll call Gottwald in advance to make sure his men don't get in your way." He glanced up. "And the leads we discussed?"

"No-one's above suspicion." (He doubted Lloyd's involvement, but he was not going to bring that up here. Not when it would open a whole other can of worms entirely.) "Everyone who was in that mansion the night the murder took place and doesn't have an airtight alibi." Suzaku fought back a grimace. His colleagues weren't going to love him for this: "Even the royals."

The answer seemed to be the one everyone suspected was coming anyway. "Weinberg," Bismarck nodded, jotting something onto a page torn from his notebook and sliding it his way. "Set up another audience with Princess Cornelia."

Gino seemed at once delighted and confused. "I thought her alibi checked out?"

"It does, but her sister's is less than nonexistent. See if you can learn anything useful through her. If Princess Euphemia is there and offers to be helpful then talk to her. Don't seek her out otherwise."

"Ah, a fishing trip." Gino's smile widened, but the mirth in his eyes died.

"The rest of this is just too much trouble, so we'll see if Gottwald can spare some manpower to help us with the interrogations. Nonette, I'd like you to track down General Bartley again."

"Wonderful," she muttered, snapping her folder shut.

"The rest of us will have to deal with all this red tape for today," he sighed. "I suppose we'll have our hands full with this case until it's resolved. This had better end well."

Suzaku certainly hoped so himself. "What's the soonest I can go back to the scene?" he asked, already eager to be out of this building.

"I'll make one phone call, then I'll let you know. But you're not going alone." Bismarck nodded once at Luciano. "You're off paperwork this afternoon. Go with him."

Normally Suzaku's widened eyes and Luciano's emphatic _'oh, hell no!'_ might have at least swayed opinion. This time, however, they did absolutely nothing to change his mind.

"I wasn't _asking_, Detective Bradley," he barked, but he didn't spare Suzaku a glare as well. "If we had the murder weapon, or _any_thing solid we wouldn't be having this conversation, but here we are. So, you find me a fingerprint, _you_ get that blasted knife, and maybe we'll finally get somewhere."

Suzaku watched him as he left the room, and he was still watching the doorway when he felt Gino's arm land heavily on his shoulder.

"Want to switch?"

He managed a hollow laugh. "I said I don't want to owe you any more favors."

"Who said you'd be the one owing me?"

Suzaku couldn't read the wide grin on his face, or the downward curl of Luciano's mouth then.

For a day that had started off strangely, it certainly didn't seem to be losing any steam.

========== 0

_**(9) 'Unforgettable'**_

The scene of the crime itself was surprisingly docile, remarkable given the gaggle of reporters and passersby that had crowded his office building earlier during the day. Two members of the Royal Guard stood watch at each entrance to the courtyard, and one of them eventually escorted the two detectives back into the mansion proper.

The house was completely deserted. The guests who had been staying over had been set up at nearby five-star hotels before midnight, they learned, and the rest of the household staff was nowhere to be found. The place really was as dead as a doornail, and once they ventured inside, they had to switch on the lights themselves as they went along.

Suzaku stopped for a moment at the threshold between the great room and the dining room, trying to imagine what this looked like in the final hour, between five and six last night: this room, filled with members of the nobility and royalty in evening dress, talking over the music, waiting for dinner. There, at the top of the grand staircase, Princess Guinevere must have stood with her husband-to-be - then, a practiced announcement, and polite applause. There would have been glasses clinking, teaspoons against the stems (from the more daring among the crowd), and then the music beginning once more: violins and trumpets and saxophones, in addition to _these_ fixtures left behind: harp, upright bass, piano.

And all throughout this, there would have been guests arriving late and leaving early, and servers and maids rushing from one room to the next.

"I think I might have it all figured out," Luciano said without preamble, flipping on the switch to the dining room. Those were the first words exchanged between them since they got here. "But I'm not sure if it all adds up. So what's the story here?"

"What do you mean?" Suzaku entered the dining room himself, undoing the buttons at the cuffs of his sleeves before rolling them up to his elbows.

"I get that you served together." Luciano was toying with one of his blasted knives again, openly now that he was no longer under Bismarck's watchful eye. "But that was years ago. Why would Prince Schneizel immediately place _you_ in charge, without even shopping around first? I wonder."

He knew better than to think this question stemmed from innocent curiosity. "Hell if I know," he shrugged, trying to make it seem as though he didn't care one way or another. "It's not like I asked for this, anyway."

"Hmmm, and yet you got it." Suzaku's gaze skimmed the nearby window ledge, hunting for fingerprints. It was boarded up from the outside - as were all the rest, actually, suffocating the mansion of any natural light - but he didn't miss Luciano's narrowed eyes reflected in the glass. "That was four years ago, right? I'm surprised he still remembers you."

"Me too," he lied. Of course Schneizel remembered him - the cheques that still came in the mail twice a month had the Second Prince's elaborate signature on the bottom-right, the 'Memo' line always mockingly left blank (because: what ever would it say?) _Blood money_. This had been going on like clockwork since his discharge, four years ago, and every two weeks Suzaku would stuff the new arrival among all the others in a shoebox, to be forgotten.

"Maybe you were a good soldier, then." That finally prompted Suzaku to meet the other man's eyes, which were smiling now. "Were you?"

_'Good dog. That's what you are.'_

"I got by." Suzaku withdrew a pair of gloves from a satchel and tossed them Luciano's way. "Put those on."

The dining room looked more or less the same as it did when they'd last left it - large, exquisitely decorated, and _frustratingly_ devoid of any useful evidence. The corpse was gone now, and the only trace there was of it ever having been here was just the pool of blood on the floor, several feet wide, by now darkened and settled in the carpet.

Suzaku crouched down at the edge of the bloodstain, frustrated. The circumstantial evidence they'd already collected - the glass, the ashes, the scrap of cloth - had long since been taken away for study, and now after almost an hour of this madness it seemed as though there was literally _nothing_ left. _What happened here?_ he wanted to ask, no longer above questioning the furniture if there was even the slightest chance it could talk back. A _murder_ took place in this room, so how - ?

He stopped mid-thought. Wait.

"You were with the hospital team that examined the corpse, right?" Suzaku asked, rising to his feet. "Did that turn up anything?"

"Nothing." Luciano was on his hands and knees, sweeping the tiny area under the buffet table with a flashlight. "Just that someone slit his throat."

"And the wound says what about our killer, exactly?"

"Amateur. Two strokes, because the idiot fucked it up halfway and couldn't get the job done in one." He snorted, and then added, "Right-handed."

Suzaku frowned. "Right-handed?"

"The natural tendency," Luciano sighed irritably, as though he were explaining _common knowledge_ here, "is to slash away from the center of the body - towards the dominant hand. Odysseus was killed from the front; otherwise we'd have ended up with a completely different wound, and I'd have been able to tell."

Was it supposed to be better, then, that their victim might have seen his attacker's face before he died? Either way, it was completely useless to them now. "Hmm."

"The voices in your head beg to differ?"

Suzaku was too lost in thought to even process that jab. "Come here. Humor me," he added, when Luciano only stared at him. He stepped forward until his feet barely touched the edge of the bloodstain, and then he moved a few paces away, closer to the table - Odysseus had been taller than him, but if it was all the same... "I'm the victim," he said. "You come up in front of me, run a knife across my throat - where does the blood go?"

Luciano walked over to him with a deep frown, brandishing the knife. He stopped an arm's length away from Suzaku and gripped the handle so that the blade stalled maybe a hair's width from Suzaku's neck, before slowly tracing out an imaginary slash wound. "Everywhere," he replied, bringing the knife down. He gestured down across his shirt, then glanced at the table, at the floor once over each shoulder. "From this high up, here, there, there, and splatters on everything else."

Suzaku nodded, having suspected as much. And yet all of the places Luciano had indicated were pristine, and he highly doubted the killer could have walked around the mansion dripping in blood, without anyone noticing.

But if the murder had taken place elsewhere, why were _all_ the rooms apparently picture-perfect, then? Bismarck had ordered a sweep of the entire mansion yesterday - one he'd missed because he showed up _late_, but surely someone would have picked up on bloodstains on the floor.

Unless -

"This connects straight to the kitchen, right?" he asked, nodding towards the door in question.

"Sure." Luciano was dismissive as he returned the knife to wherever he usually kept it, but Suzaku was already halfway there. "What, you think he was murdered in the kitchen?"

"Not the kitchen," Suzaku muttered, flipping on the lights. The tiles were embossed, and it would have taken forever to get the blood out of the little cracks and pits there, not to mention the walls and _curtains_ - definitely not the kitchen. "But doesn't this mansion have a larder?"

It did, accessible by a trick door beside the one leading to the pantry. A short flight of stairs led to a cool, dark enclosure that perpetually smelled of blood. It took forever to find the light switch, and when they did only one of the three bulbs overhead came to life, flickering and caked with dust. The hooks hung empty from the ceiling - perhaps the engagement party had exhausted the mansion's meat provisions, and there was certainly no reason to replenish those now.

"_This_ would have cut it, for sure." The walls and floor were made of a dark gray, unpolished stone, the latter sloped towards an easy drainage channel obscured by chopping tables. "One bucket of water, or even a quick hose-down," Luciano nodded towards the implement coiled in the corner, "and all the blood disappears. Like magic."

"And an exit, too." Suzaku was holding the flashlight now, and shining the light on an unmarked, second door following a small ladder. The larder was larger than most he'd seen, sitting lower than the first storey but not quite underground either - just low and buried enough to be cool, but not completely so that air could still come in, through a small sliver of window covered in wire mesh to keep insects out. The door led immediately to the outside, he learned, specifically the back of the house.

It made sense, he supposed, that things like dead livestock wouldn't exactly be welcomed through the mansion's front doors.

"So you're saying," Luciano quipped as they retraced their steps, "our murder took place in the larder, and the body was simply moved to the dining room?"

"Not necessarily," Suzaku shook his head. "But it's possible. Killer escapes to the outside, accomplice drags the corpse back up. It begs the question as to why Odysseus was in the larder in the first place, and _how_ he didn't leave a trail of blood in the kitchen, but..." He shrugged. "It would explain why there was no sign of a struggle in the room where he was found?"

"You can easily stem blood flow with a towel, after all, once it's started."

Luciano seemed so sure of himself, and so nonchalant, and Suzaku just shook his head. "Where would _that_ be, then?"

"No clue." The man squinted at him for a bit, before breaking into a chuckle. "Although, I'm not buying it."

Suzaku went over the theory once more in his head, trying to find an inconsistency. He ended up drawing a blank. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing. But." And at this Luciano stepped forward and pressed both hands down Suzaku's shoulders. "Occam's Razor."

_The simplest explanation is the correct one._ That was it, in a nutshell. He had no idea what that had to do with anything, or why Luciano was now pushing him down to the floor. "Hey!"

"Down," he said simply. "Humor me. I'll show you."

Suzaku growled, but Luciano's grip was insistent, and his smile for once seemed neither mocking nor malicious. So he acquiesced, and he winced when he realized he was lying right on top of the pool of blood. The fucking bastard - "Now what," he hissed, a little bit unnerved at having the other detective hovering above him.

"Now..." Luciano shifted so that he was almost straddling him, and then withdrew the knife again. "I kill you."

He performed the same mock-slash maneuver as before, the lethal blade still barely hovering above Suzaku's skin. But this time, he understood the difference. "The blood goes only on the floor," he said, nodding when realization dawned.

"We'd still have blood on our murderer," Luciano shrugged, frowning at imagined stains of red on his shirt, "but a bit less this time. And all the blood that spatters on the floor..."

"Ends up covered by even more blood," Suzaku finished for him. Granted, this theory warranted an explanation of how Odysseus had ended up on the floor (was he struck down, and with what, and if so _why_ were there still no signs of a struggle?) but his first guess had been riddled with just as many loopholes, if not more. They had to start _some_where.

Luciano walked away without even looking as though he'd ever _considered_ offering a hand, so Suzaku rolled his eyes and pulled himself up to his feet. He made a mental note to trash the shirt he was wearing today the moment he got home. The blood on the carpet had dried, but God knew _what_ was still in there.

And that was when all the lights died out.

Suzaku had withdrawn his revolver in an instant, fingering the trigger as Luciano let out a loud curse. In the pitch blackness he could hear the knife coming out again, and he tried to listen to his head (_not_ his heart, which was just thumping in his chest and fielding useless sentiments like _bad_ and _run_ and _now_) when it demanded more light. He still had Luciano's flashlight on him, didn't he? If he could just...

By the time he'd found the damn thing and managed to switch it on with one hand, the yellow glow immediately bathed a stoic face standing not two feet away.

"Jesus _Christ_," Suzaku swore, nearly dropping the flashlight entirely. Beside him, Luciano tensed and whirled around, tightly gripping two knives that looked as though they were ready to fly at a moment's notice. But Suzaku removed his finger from the trigger, although he still kept the gun aimed high. "Who the hell are you?"

Oddly enough, the man didn't seem the least bit perturbed to have two armed men quite ready to kill him. "Terribly sorry about that, sirs," he said, his voice rich and cultured with the slightest hint of an accent - Italian? "The guards informed me you'd entered the premises some time ago, but I assumed you'd already left. I did not mean to startle you."

He then flipped the light switch back on, and Suzaku finally lowered his gun, having placed the man's features. "Wait a minute, I know you." He frowned, sifting through the many faces and names in his mind, struggling all the way when all he came up with was, "You were Prince Schneizel's aide back in Paris, right?"

"Milan, Barcelona, London, Paris, and now back in Pendragon. Kanon Maldini," the man offered, dipping his head by way of greeting to Luciano, who still didn't lower his knives. He seemed nonplussed at this, regardless, turning to Suzaku with a close-lipped smile. "I'm pleased you remember me, though I myself make it a point never to forget a face. Major Kururugi, is it not?"

Suzaku shut off the flashlight and tried not to scowl. "It's 'Detective', now."

"Oh yes, of course. The fearless detective who has taken on the case of my lord's brother's gruesome murder." He chuckled. "Any leads yet, Detective?"

"...None that we can tell you at the moment." Kanon looked the same as he did four years ago - still as effeminate, still with those same pale eyes that seemed as though they were made for haunting - but it was odd. At that time, he and Kanon only ever exchanged curt greetings and nods whenever they ran into one another in the hallways, and the aide would add on an extra glare whenever he came from Schneizel's office. Although, he hadn't thought much of it back then, and even now he couldn't find a reason to blame the man, really. "What's wrong with your hand?"

Kanon brought the aforementioned hand to his chest - it was covered in bandages, from the ends of each finger to well below his wrist. "Domestic accident," he said with a shrug. "Happens to the best of us."

"I'm sure," Luciano scowled darkly.

He got only a smile for that. "Well, do carry on, Detectives. I apologize for intruding; I simply wondered why the lights were on, and wanted to make sure everything was in order for the preparations."

"Preparations?" Suzaku echoed.

"This building is going to be condemned," Kanon smiled. "The lot is in prime location, but surely no-one wants to live in a house with the ghost of a dead Prince lurking about in the dining room, no?" He chuckled then, before turning to retreat back to the great room. "Please, do go on. I'll be sure to stay out of your way."

They didn't stay much longer after that, despite the man's urgings. Kanon's arrival had completely killed their search's momentum, but even then it wasn't as though that search had been very productive to begin with. Suzaku could no longer remember if Kanon was at the party (though, he _must_ have been; where Schneizel went, he would follow, and that probably didn't change), or if he'd given a statement. He would have to look that up.

He sighed. With so many suspects and witnesses, it was sometimes easier to think of them as names and numbers. Clearly that was going to backfire.

And they never did find that knife.

The drive back was dreary and uneventful, in which he tuned out Luciano's taunting and chatter and simply stared out the window. And when he walked in he was sorely tempted to call it a day.

But as luck would have it -

"You have a man waiting for you in your office. He says he wants to speak with you," Marika informed him, when he was not two steps into the lobby. She gave him a surname, and added, "Familiar?"

Suzaku shook his head. "I don't know him."

"Oh?" She tilted her head. "But he insists you do."

Suzaku frowned and turned around then - there, through the gap between the jamb and his half-open door, he saw raven hair and violet eyes, already watching him.

========== 0

Author's (end) notes: May is LOLthesis-month, as those of you who have read my recent LJ quasi-rant probably already know. So I'll be a bit spottier with the updates – still, don't discount the possibility of a random nwahr post mid-May. This fic is _still_ my guilty pleasure, after all.

Thanks for reading! Comments are loved :D.


	7. to unfold

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

========== 0

_**(10) 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered'**_

What did you say to someone whose privacy you invaded, whose company you all but_ forced _yourself into only to ditch in the rudest way imaginable? The way Suzaku saw it, there wasn't a good answer to this question, which was why when the door clicked shut behind him, it was Lelouch who had to break the heavy silence: "Good afternoon, Detective."

The greeting hung waiting in the air, awkward, and almost went unreturned. "Afternoon." Suzaku nodded once, finally gathering his wits enough to walk around his desk, pull back his chair and sit down. He was well aware of Lelouch's eyes on him the entire time. "How - " He glanced at the clock and frowned. _How did you find me_, he would have said, but with the way the newspapers now stalked their agency's every move, he supposed the question was meaningless. "How long have you been waiting?"

Lelouch shrugged. "Not too long. An hour...maybe two." Suzaku would have said something to that, but he was in the middle of a swig of coffee and the other man continued before he could finish: "They told me you were on the field today."

"I was," he nodded, fumbling for a pen and a clean sheet of paper under all the clutter that was on his desk. "I just now got back."

"I see."

"Hmmm." He found a pen and scribbled blindly on an old parking ticket to see if it worked (it didn't), avoiding Lelouch's eyes the whole time. There was no earthly reason that conversation should be this_ hard_, he tried to convince himself. And yet the evidence was proving otherwise. Well, might as well cut through the bullshit, then: "What brings you here?"

Although he could have stood to phrase that more politely, Lelouch merely smiled, nodding towards - how did he not notice the wrapped bundle sitting atop the other chair until now? "I thought you might like this back," he said nonchalantly. There was a pause, and when Suzaku looked up Lelouch met his eye. "That," he murmured, "and an apology."

"That's not really necessary," Suzaku said, breaking the gaze-lock and diving through the mess for another pen (because this was still easier) -

"No," Lelouch shook his head insistently. "I feel as though I might have made you..." Even when he hesitated for the right word, Lelouch looked anything but flustered, simply tipping his head to the side, thoughtful. "Uncomfortable," he eventually settled on. "I didn't intend for that."

_I'm sure you didn't._ "It's okay," he said instead, eyeing the plastic bundle. Lelouch had packaged his coat neatly, with the creases smoothed out and crisp folds along the seams and - he squinted - had he had it_ cleaned?_ "You really didn't have to."

"You wouldn't have wanted your coat back?"

"No - well, I_ would _have." Especially since it wasn't going to be sweltering July forever, after all. "But you really didn't have to come all the way here. I would have gone back to the bar eventually."

"Hmmm." His lips quirked up in a strange smile. "Would you, though? I wonder."

Suzaku blinked. He wasn't sure what exactly to make of that. Nor was he sure what to make of Lelouch's posture now, leaning back in the chair with his legs crossed, his elbows resting on the arms and his fingers steepled in front of his face. Long, elegant fingers, the bone protruding ever so slightly around the knuckles and joints - perfect for the man's career choice (or perhaps it was the other way around?) Suzaku was thinking to himself, before he shook that errant thought away.

"Either way, thanks," he said. "A lot. And..." He swallowed. "I'm sorry I bailed on you that night too."

"Were you all right?" There was a softness in Lelouch's eyes now. "I warned you, though."

"You did," Suzaku nodded. "It's fine. I'm fine."

Another lull followed after that, in which Lelouch was once again the infinitely more composed of the two - he just sat there, unmoving with a polite smile on his face, as though the silence didn't bother him in the slightest. Suzaku, on the other hand, found himself glancing everywhere_ but _at the man before him, fiddling with the fabric of his coat and_ why _was it so hard to find a working pen, God damn it -

"Well," Lelouch eventually shrugged. "If that will be all..."

"Wait. Actually..." Suzaku felt some of the tension finally evaporating when he stopped the pianist from leaving. He felt a twinge of guilt at that, because although he didn't have a choice - "If you left your name with the secretary, she probably registered you as a potential witness. Which means I'll have to ask you a few questions before you can go." - he felt as though deep down, that wasn't the only reason he was asking Lelouch to stay.

"Really?"

"I'm afraid so."

"I didn't come here for that." Strangely enough, Lelouch seemed not so much angry or annoyed, as he was_ amused._ "I just told her I wanted to speak with you."

"She would have assumed it, then. Formality." He shrugged by way of apology, digging under a pile of witness statements that were probably three cases old and -_ yes_, a pencil. "I hope you don't mind?"

"Not at all." Lelouch was still smiling. "Quite the contrary, if it means I can share a few more minutes of your company."

...And what did you say to_ that?_ "Ah. Ch-charmed," Suzaku stammered, pointedly ignoring Lelouch's stare, and the flush in his cheeks as he found his legal pad. He leafed through the notes before ripping out a blank page somewhere in the middle. "Okay. So. Mister..." What was the name Marika had said? "...Lamperouge, was it?"

He got only a chuckle for that; he wondered if he'd pronounced it wrong. "'Lelouch' is just fine."

"Not in here, it isn't." Suzaku gestured towards the office interior. Meeting at the bar was one thing, but here... "I'm Detective Kururugi, and you're Mr. Lamperouge."

"You're serious." Lelouch laughed, softly. "I really don't think this is all necessary."

"Oh, but it is."_ Which is why you shouldn't have come here. _Suzaku grinned, and jotted down a couple of lines at the top of the page: the date, and the pianist's name._ Lelouch Lamperouge _- hmmm. "May I ask where you were between 5 and 7 in the evening yesterday?"

Lelouch simply hummed into his fingers, staring straight ahead as though he hadn't even heard the question. "You know what I want?" he said, after entirely too long. "Coffee."

"...Coffee?"

"Mmm yes." He couldn't see the bottom half of Lelouch's face from here, but his violet eyes were crinkled in a smile. "Yes. The dreaded afternoon lethargy has begun. A cup of coffee sounds good right about now."

Suzaku frowned, tilting his own mug and glancing inside. And how did that reasoning even work for someone with a schedule like Lelouch's, anyway? "I could make another pot if you like - "

"No," Lelouch cut in. "I'm thinking...a change of location." The pianist finally brought his hands down, resting them on his lap. "I know of a nice little cafe ten minutes from here, halfway to the bar." He flashed Suzaku a confident smile. "Isn't the working day technically over by now anyway?"

"Almost." Suzaku qualified that very carefully as he glanced at the clock. Certainly Lelouch wasn't suggesting what the_ thought _he was suggesting... "But if I told you I planned to work overtime?"

"Then you could pass this off as me being an uncooperative interrogation subject, and you doing whatever it took to get the job done. That works, right?" And that_ did _work, in theory at least, but Lelouch already knew that, because Lelouch was already uncrossing his legs and rising to his feet. "A proposition, then: you drive, and once we get there I buy you something and answer whatever questions you might have. Acceptable, Detective?"

He supposed there wasn't really a choice to this, as it was either he went along and humored this pianist's strange request, or let Lelouch walk away and leave him empty-handed with nothing to show for what should have been a formal questioning. Which would then be brought to Bismarck's attention, who would then most probably raise hell for him wasting company time - and so on.

He did wonder, though, if all of_ that _was just flimsy justification, as within fifteen minutes they were seated at a table, having just given their orders to a waitress who promised them their coffee was 'coming right up.'

Suzaku sighed, leaning back into his chair and resisting the urge to just slump. All in all, it had been an exhausting day, the hangover of death from that morning having been slowly replaced by this heavy, mind-clouding exhaustion. Clearly the coffee he'd had at the office wasn't doing its job, although the ambience didn't help - the place Lelouch had chosen was a cozy little corner cafe along a strip that was composed entirely of restaurants and similar establishments, made of brick and mortar and a dense, permanent cloud of cigarette smoke. The cafe wasn't particularly well-lit, so even sitting right next to a window did little to remedy the dim, almost sleepy atmosphere.

"Right, so...where were we?" He'd brought only the pencil along, having left even his coat back at the office, so he swiped a napkin from the dispenser and began to write. "Your whereabouts on the night of the murder."

"I was at the library," Lelouch drawled, watching as Suzaku scribbled onto the napkin, lightly so as not to tear it. "The one by the post office."

That was unnecessary, as there was really only one library this side of town. Suzaku paused at that, though, because that very same library was located rather close to the scene of the crime - ten, fifteen minutes easily on foot. "What were you doing there?"

"I was trying to track down sheet music for a piece that's been playing in my head for some time." He hummed a few bars then - a melody Suzaku had never heard in his life. "Alas, no luck."

He smiled at the waitress as she returned with two cups of coffee for them, in steaming, fanciful mugs of porcelain in off-white and brown.

"Does everyone in your family have green eyes?"

And Suzaku thought that if he'd been drinking just before that, he might have choked at the completely inane question. "What?"

"Standard interrogations are hardly fair," Lelouch shrugged. "One person asks all the questions and the other provides all the answers."

"This isn't a standard interrogation," Suzaku deadpanned. Just in case the coffee, the time, and the location didn't make that clear enough -

"Precisely." The pianist smiled. "So is that a 'yes' or a 'no'?"

_...Anything to get the job done _Suzaku repeated to himself, biting on the inside of his lip as he watched the wisps rising from his cup. No matter which way he looked at this, this was really quite ridiculous - he was questioning a civilian whom he had no reason to believe was even remotely connected to the crime, when he still had dozens of suspects he had yet to even speak to. All things considered, he really ought to just end this now:_ potential witness had nothing of value to report after an hour of questioning_, and let Bismarck make of that whatever he liked. He ought to get back to actually working on the case - or maybe, hit the bar now and make it easier for himself in the morning.

But he didn't. He didn't know why, and he didn't know why he settled for stirring his coffee absentmindedly as he answered. "Not everyone. My cousin has them. My father doesn't." He shrugged. "Hit and miss, I guess."

"Hmmm." Lelouch was studying his face, and not being at all discreet about it. "Interesting."

Lelouch took his coffee with one lump of sugar, as well as enough cream to drown out the blackness, until it was a rich, light color. And he was precise in his actions, never clinking the teaspoon against the side of the mug, never spilling a grain or a drop - and maybe Suzaku really ought to get back to the questioning now. He cleared his throat. "How long were you there for?"

"I don't know." The pianist frowned, tapping the teaspoon once against the edge of the mug and bringing the tip up to his lips - lips which caught the stray drop of coffee that had remained there, aided by the smallest flash of a tongue, pink and soft against the hard metal. (And what the_ hell _was wrong with him, really? Suzaku gripped the pencil and tore his eyes away, back down to his notes on the napkin.) "Maybe a couple of hours? More? It's easy to lose track of time when you're not particularly in a hurry."

He nodded and wrote down as much:_ Time is relative._ "And you were there the whole time? You didn't happen to, say, head out for a break in the middle of your search?"

"Are you just trying to ask if I was at Prince Odysseus' mansion that day? Because I can assure you my name wasn't on the guest list."

He chuckled then, and Suzaku bit back a smile as he wrote. He'd have to double-check that, of course, but he was fairly certain he would have remembered seeing the pianist's name the first time around; how common was a name like 'Lelouch' anyway? "Duly noted."

"Yes, and that means I can ask two questions now, right?"

"...At what point did we establish that we were doing this back and forth?"

"I'd say, about five seconds ago," Lelouch murmured, after pretending to think about it. "Well?"

Suzaku raised an eyebrow. Tricky. "Alright. Go for it."

Lelouch smiled, apparently very pleased with this. He took a long, indulgent sip of his coffee, entirely on his own time. "How long have you been living in Pendragon?"

He'd known better than to expect questions that were strictly professional, by now. This was probably for the best, anyway. "Four years," he supplied.

"You have family here?"

"Not in Pendragon, no."

"Where are they?"

"Ah." Suzaku waved the pencil at him, smirking. "_Two _questions, remember? My turn."

Lelouch rolled his eyes. "And here I was hoping I could sneak that past you."

"Mmmm." Suzaku glanced down at his notes as he sipped at his coffee, black, not quite as strong as he was accustomed to, but close enough. "Would you happen to know anyone who would have any motive or opportunity to commit the murder?"

It was a standard question that may as well have been written on a cue card, and Lelouch seemed to realize as much. "Not particularly. I mean no disrespect to the dead, but Prince Odysseus wasn't really very remarkable." He shrugged. "I suppose I can't imagine why anyone would despise him enough to kill him."

Suzaku nodded; he'd exhausted most of the space on the napkin by this point. "I see."

"So?" Lelouch pressed, clearly not having forgotten. "Family?"

He sighed. "Back in Japan. I'm the only one this side of the Pacific."

The pianist seemed to consider this for a bit. "Married?"

"Good God no." Suzaku shook his head insistently at that, as though the mere idea of it were absurd. Which it was.

"Hmmm." Lelouch took another sip of his coffee, though he was watching Suzaku the entire time, eyes meeting eyes over the rim of the mug. "You don't mind that I'm asking you all this?" he finally said.

He should, really. But... Suzaku shrugged. "You haven't really asked me anything I'm uncomfortable talking about. If that happens, I just won't answer."

"Oh?" His lips curved up in a smile. "And what if you become famous after eventually cracking this case, and I capitalize on this conversation? Would you hate me if I did?"

"What if one of us dies tomorrow?" Suzaku met the pianist's gaze evenly, although he didn't smile. To a certain extent, this was why he no longer made any long-term plans, or even bothered thinking about things too far ahead in the future. It was easier to just coast along, take things as they came - because the most careful of plans could be undone by just about_ anything_, and one of those happened to be a constant of this world. "Or the day after? Then whatever happened here wouldn't matter."

Lelouch eyed him for a very long time after that, with much renewed interest. "Fascinating outlook," he said with a laugh. "Though, I do wonder how such a philosophy doesn't get in the way of you doing your job."

Suzaku simply hummed into his coffee (because on the contrary: it made it_ easier_, but he supposed Lelouch didn't know just what_ exactly _he did at the agency, or what his specialty there was.) "And you?"

He didn't have to expound on what exactly that pertained to. "My family is in Pendragon, but we don't get along." There was a note of finality in his voice that didn't speak quite as loudly as the thin, tight line of his lips, before he broke it with a smile. "And no, I'm not married. And I never will be."

This time it was Suzaku's turn to flash a wry smile, at Lelouch and his elegant fingers (his_ smooth _fingers), his striking eyes. "You don't think you're being a little_ too _hasty with that prediction?"

But Lelouch only returned the smile, taking that moment to lean forward and prop his elbows against the table, cupping his face in his hands. "I wonder," was all he said to that.

And there was something unnerving about the way Lelouch looked at him after that - even more unnerving, but not by much, than how that look didn't just make him uncomfortable, but actually almost..._ almost._..

He coughed, and looked pointedly away. Evening had begun to set in - it was clear from the sky, and how the sunlight was now slowly shifting to a redder color. Not that there was much of it to begin with. "Are you working at the bar tonight?"

Lelouch blinked. "Sure. Six nights a week."

Suzaku nodded. "Right." Then he nodded again. "Let me know."

He never became entirely sure why he made that offer, or why he stayed with Lelouch at the same table, in the same corner of that same cafe, until just past nine in the evening. Until the twilight snuffed out all of the sun and the sky turned black, until the same waitress had graced them with refills twice, until Suzaku realized that the discomfort was still there, but by now just an_ afterthought._ And that if he really thought about it - well, it seemed as though he was actually enjoying himself.

They spoke of less grave things after that - relatively trivial things like the rumors of war, the price of gold, the colorful regulars at_ Arthur's Castle._ Once, Lelouch asked what Suzaku did before becoming a detective; he answered with 'I was a soldier' and thankfully, that was the end of it.

(Or, it was almost the end of it: he'd made the mistake of returning the question to Lelouch, whose answer - "Many, many things" - was even more evasive and closed-off than his.)

But other than that, it was...refreshing, this evening. To get away from the office and the case, in every possible way, for once not worrying about one thing or another and just - making small talk with the pianist of one of the local bars. There were parts of Lelouch that put him at ease, he found: his quiet laughter, the sound of his voice, the way he gestured with his hands when the topic came to something he was very familiar with - those parts.

And then there were parts of Lelouch that were disquieting...or maybe there was just one, the way Lelouch looked at him throughout it all, his eyes never leaving Suzaku for an extended period of time, and a glint therein that Suzaku couldn't read no matter how hard he tried.

Still, he supposed, as they finally pulled over to the side of the street where_ Arthur's Castle _and its lights stood like a familiar haunt (like home): this had been a good night. After that disaster at the piano, especially - this was a better outcome than he'd been hoping for.

(And maybe that counted for something.)

"Not joining us for a drink tonight?" Lelouch asked, and when Suzaku slowed to a stop and glanced his way, he smirked. "Or twelve?"

"Point taken," he chuckled, parking the car and flashing his blinkers. "Not tonight, though. I think I'll head back to the office actually, try to get some work done." There was enough caffeine in his system to keep him alert for at least the next couple of hours; he figured he may as well put them to good use.

"Well I appreciate the ride." Lelouch unbuckled his seatbelt. "I'm in your debt."

"Don't be silly." Suzaku shook his head. "You bought me coffee. And you returned my coat. If anything,_ I _owe_ you._"

"Hmmm." There was the sound of Lelouch reaching for the door handle, then the door itself opening, before: "Suzaku."

Suzaku didn't realize, then, that this was the first time the pianist called him by name. Or, that he pronounced it almost flawlessly, lingering just a split-second too long on the last syllable - or, that he didn't mind. All that happened was that he heard his name, and he turned his head on instinct, and suddenly felt Lelouch's lips pressed against his own.

His hand on the ignition jerked, and as the engine died so did all the thoughts churning in his mind.

A moment - really, that was all it was.

A moment, and all he could see through widened eyes was Lelouch's face, so close to his own, long black eyelashes so stark against his pale cheeks. The taste of coffee, and other things. Lelouch's hand on his shoulder, the other...on his leg, warm, just above his knee (and what was it doing there, what was he doing and what were they_ both _doing - )

But then the lips pulled away, and their owner lingered in the space close to Suzaku as he smiled; something glittered in his half-lidded,_ alarmingly _close violet eyes.

And Lelouch only chuckled, his breath breaking over Suzaku's lips when he voiced the question Suzaku could not: "Why?" His eyes then softened, and his lips curved into a smile. "Because one of us could die tomorrow. And wouldn't that be a shame."

It was just half past nine when Lelouch finally stepped out of the car, sauntering towards the entrance to the bar, with not even a backward glance.

It would take another ten minutes before Suzaku finally recovered, enough to start the engine and pull out of that street, just before the music could start.

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Author's (end) notes: Back from the dead! May is over, so consistent (-ish) nwahr updates should be the norm once more.

Reviews are the new cookies!


	8. and it's sad

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(11) 'I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)'**_

By the depressingly harsh light in his office, the only one he'd bothered to turn on in the entire building, Suzaku wasn't getting any work done.

The detective heaved a sigh,_ exasperated,_ when he glanced up at the clock and found yet another fifteen minutes had bled uselessly away. This was stupid, and he really may as well have gone home and called it a night. But the coffee made the blood hum restlessly in his veins, and he wondered how much more luck he was destined to have if, say, he tried to force himself to sleep, lying idly on his bed...

_That _thought made his hand clench around the pencil and nearly drive the tip through the page. No, he told himself, he was not thinking of those things. He was not_ (those lips, those eyes, those fine hands)._.. thinking of those things.

Lelouch hadn't bothered sticking around long afterward, which was just as fine - again, in a dilemma he was starting to find himself in very often these past few days: what did you say to a man who just_ kissed _you, in a car parked under a streetlight in the middle of town? He supposed they didn't teach you the answer to that just anywhere. And if it was something you were supposed to learn along the way, he clearly hadn't been paying attention.

Suzaku sighed again, pushing away the thick stack of new witness statements left by Monica on his desk; he could leaf through the records of random citizens lying to his colleagues some other time. Monica had come up with other things - ah yes, among them, the blueprints of Odysseus' mansion. He removed the plans from the otherwise unmarked cardboard tube, unrolling the heavy waxy paper. He frowned when it demanded much more space than his desk could provide.

The Prince was murdered in the dining room - it didn't take long to find it on the blueprints, as apparently it was smaller only than the great room and the private lounge on the second floor. He ticked carefully through the exits and entrances, windows included, marking those that led to the street, double_ those _if there wasn't a guard posted at that particular spot that night...

_("Because one of us could die tomorrow," Lelouch had practically quoted back at him. "And wouldn't that be a shame.")_

Since when was that a proper way to justify a kiss, Suzaku thought, shaking his head. Did Lelouch go around kissing random strangers who caught his eye, then, entirely on the notion that he might not get the chance if the world were to end the next day?

Of course, that...assumption required that he had somehow caught the pianist's eye to begin with, and that was another confusing thread altogether.

"Case," he said aloud then, all but slamming a pack of cigarettes down against the end of the paper as it stubbornly tried to curl back into itself. "Murder of the_ century._" If muttering Kallen's words back to himself in the middle of the night couldn't get him back to work, he wasn't sure what could.

Apparently, though,_ nothing _could, as no sooner had he glanced over his notes scribbled around the dining room, than he found his eyes sliding, uncooperative, coming to rest on the space in the great room where a grand piano had been marked in black - a fixture - and it wasn't long before his thoughts drifted from there.

_("Not joining us for a drink tonight? Or twelve?")_

Perhaps it wasn't the kiss per se - he didn't have to use his imagination for the scenario to play out in his head had that passenger been Millay, or Monica, or... that other girl, the waitress at_ Arthur's Castle _with the long hair (damn it, he could have sworn he had her name down by this point.) He never thought twice about things like that. But of course, this was different, because...

The stencilled lettering that made up the unnecessary 'GRAND PIANO' label seemed to be mocking him. Because: ...what, exactly?

And perhaps it wasn't even that Lelouch was a man. Suzaku had certainly..._ done things _with men before. But those encounters were from back in his days at the army, where the woeful lack of women was (not quite) resolved by generous rations of alcohol. There was a little bit of desperation there, though it was tempered by trust: the kind borne of close-knit camaraderie, in turn borne of going out every morning and trying not to get each other killed.

There was desperation, and then there was_ desperation,_ but that was an entirely different matter altogether.

Still,_ one _kiss shouldn't linger in his mind this much, especially not from Lelouch. He didn't - well, he was rather_ certain _he didn't quite swing that way. And if by some chance he did, shouldn't he have found out long before today, and long before this?

Preposterous, he concluded. He took a cigarette out of the pack and fiddled with it listlessly. He wished that moment of enlightenment had been just a bit more fulfilling.

Suzaku wondered if maybe he was going mad.

Rubbing his eyes, he cast a somber glance at the mess of papers underneath the blueprints. His eyes fell upon his copy of the guest list at Princess Guinevere's engagement party once more: Lelouch's name wasn't on it, just as he'd claimed (and Suzaku knew because he checked no less than thrice), even though there were musicians at the event. But that didn't mean anything; there must have been dozens of pianists living in Pendragon.

Still, Suzaku found himself wondering how Lelouch would have played that night, had he been invited to perform. Would he have played like he was wont to during nights at the bar, all professional and barely smiling, as though he didn't have a care in the world, or would his temperament have been closer to that one night he'd played for Suzaku, slightly playful and - near the end - almost_ affectionate?_ Would the songs he'd chosen have resembled his questions at the cafe, rapid fire and no pretense? Or would they have been soft like his kiss was, muted at the moment but slow to die from memory?

The only reply he got to all of those questions was the sudden ringing of the telephone.

Suzaku jumped a little in his seat, practically crushing the cigarette in his hand. Cursing to himself, he looked at the clock:_ 2:20 a.m. _Who in the world...?

He lifted the handset before another shrill ring could pierce the silence, cleared his throat, and placed the phone to his ear. "Camelot," he said, tossing the cigarette towards his wastebasket.

It missed, and joined the small litter of crumpled-up paper balls and wrappers that lay in a ring around the base. There was some static on the other end (was the caller from overseas? That would certainly explain the odd time), but the voice came out clearly enough when it did:_ "I'm looking for Suzaku Kururugi."_

A woman's voice, Suzaku noted. He wedged the handset between his ear and his shoulder and fumbled for something to write on - eventually deciding,_ ah hell,_ the margin of the blueprints would do. "Speaking."

_"Ah. You're the primary investigator on the Britannia case, right?"?_

"That's me," he sighed, leaning back a bit. Or perhaps this was going to be an anonymous tip, he thought then, revising his earlier guess. "How can I help you?" He certainly hoped so; though in that case Kallen's inclusion of that little blurb near the end of her article would have proved useful after all, and oh how she would gloat about it once she found out -

_"Drop it."_

Suzaku blinked and sat up straight, thinking he'd misheard. "I beg your pardon?"

There was a pause, before the woman continued._ "I said, drop the case." _This whole time the woman's voice had been toneless, almost bored - but now there was no mistaking the edge there now._ "While you still can."_

His eyebrows slid together. "Who is this?" he demanded.

There was another pause, longer this time. His grip tightened around the handset. But he couldn't make out the last few words the woman whispered, before the line suddenly went dead.

Suzaku stared at the handset incredulously; the dial tone, eerie and lifeless, was audible even when he held it at arm's length.

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_**(12) 'I Love You For Sentimental Reasons'**_

"So. Any word from that mystery caller yet?"

Suzaku shook his head, unconsciously chewing on his cigarette as he parked the car. An entire week had passed since that day - that phone call, a blatant threat if he'd ever heard one, and when he finally placed the receiver down he'd felt, for the first time since taking on the case, a real twinge of fear creeping up his spine.

He'd told only Gino about it, the next day. The blond had given his decent share of theories, but none of them really sat well with him. In any case it was a very characteristic voice, Suzaku insisted then, and he was positive he would be able to identify the speaker if he heard her on the street, or if she called again.

The longer the week dragged on, though, the bleaker either prospect seemed.

It had also been an entire week since he'd last set foot in_ Arthur's Castle._ Gino had raised an eyebrow at Suzaku staying later and later at the office, and Kallen was more than a little intrigued at how he came home sober every night. But he told neither of them the reason why.

(Still, there was a part of him that would stare at his door whenever his mind demanded a rest, jumping a bit whenever he heard a knock, slumping back whenever it was just Gino, or another of his colleagues. There was a part of him that, as much as he loathed to admit it, wanted to see those violet eyes.)

"Yeah, sorry I've been dragging this out. I just think it's a waste of time."

Suzaku shrugged. "You know I don't mind." It turned out Gino had been stalling on meeting with Princess Cornelia for further questioning; honestly, Suzaku wouldn't even have noticed if the other detective hadn't brought it up himself, sitting next to a pot of coffee first thing in the morning and asking if perhaps Suzaku wanted to 'tag along.' "I think it's only Bismarck who really cares for this."

"Yeah, I thought he'd forget about it though. He nearly blew a gasket when he found out." Gino laughed at that. "It was kind of funny."

His lips twitched. "I'm sure it was." He exited the car after Gino did, taking one last drag before squashing the cigarette under his heel, into the road (...and wasn't_ this _a familiar sight as well.) "Well." He nodded towards the heavy iron gate. "May as well get it over with."

It took almost half an hour, and explaining to entirely too many staff members who they were and what they did, before the two detectives finally found themselves standing in Cornelia li Britannia's private home office.

As luck would have it, she wasn't at all thrilled to see them. "There's two of you," she commented, narrowing her eyes over the thin frames of her reading glasses.

"Yes, your Highness," Gino raised his head and grinned from his kneeling position. "This is my colleague, Suzaku Kururugi - you might have heard of him?"

The frown on her face only grew deeper. "I was expressly told I would be speaking with one of Waldstein's men." A short silence followed after that, one that the princess broke herself when she repeated, "_One,_" as though they hadn't understood her the first time.

This was how Suzaku found himself outside, alone, and bored within ten seconds.

He strolled the gardens with neither plan nor purpose, just wanting a way to kill the time until Gino finished. Princess Cornelia lived with her younger sister and staff in their own mansion in a quieter part of town: it was a ten-minute drive from Odysseus' residence, eighteen from downtown. It wasn't quite as fine as Odysseus' either, but it certainly wasn't lackluster on its own, with Grecian-inspired ivory columns and marble floors that were polished so well you could see your reflection in them when you walked.

But as far as beauty was concerned, the house itself had nothing on the gardens, and it was here that Cornelia's home could give her dead brother's a run for its money: a wide enclosure that echoed entire fields back in the country, gated along with the main house, the gardens held a variety of fruit trees and rare flowers, all as meticulously arranged as the grass beneath - not a single blade, it seemed, out of place. Suzaku took care not to step outside the walkway, slabs of shaved black stone that cut a winding path through the grass. None of the guards or maids had given him hell for it yet; he figured if he wasn't supposed to be here, they_ would,_ at which he would just leave.

If only everything in life were that simple, he thought, when he felt something rubbing against his leg. Glancing down, he finally tore his eyes away from the flowers to notice a plump black cat, squeezing itself between his legs, looking up at him curiously.

"Hey there." He crouched down with a smile, reaching out a hand. "You wouldn't happen to be willing to keep me company for the next twenty minutes, would you?"

The cat merely stared at him, and at his hand. It then stepped forward, its whiskers twitching once, before sinking teeth into his finger.

"_Ow._ Fuck."

"Oh my." The voice came from somewhere behind a peach tree, and rang just as sweet. "Bad kitty! Stop that!"

The cat released Suzaku's hand and darted away.

Grateful for the relief, he stood up and saw_ her _again - Cornelia's sister, the woman who had been sitting scared and nervous in Nonette's office the night Schneizel deigned to grace them with his presence. She'd loosened up considerably once Gino got a hold of her, though, and - really, it was hard to forget a face like Euphemia's. "Princess."

He didn't give her the standard military salute he'd given Schneizel or Cornelia, but he did bow at the waist. Still, she waved that away with a warm smile, and somehow this didn't surprise him. "Please. The formality really isn't necessary." She frowned after the running cat, but she didn't chase it or call it back. "And you are?"

Suzaku straightened up, though he kept his head ducked slightly. For once, someone who_ didn't _pre-empt an actual introduction. "I'm Detective Kururugi from Camelot Investigations."

"Oh yes." Her eyes brightened in recognition. "My brother says you served with him in Paris during the war."

...No,_ he'd _been the one pre-empting with his wishful thinking. "That I did."

"He's told me a lot about you."

"Ah." He didn't know what to make of that. "Good things, I do hope?"

"Of course." Euphemia smiled again, soft and wide, and it made him feel better. "He had only the most glowing praise for you."

He_ would,_ a part of him thought bitterly, but he pushed that part aside and forced himself to return the smile. "I'm honored."

She nodded. "More importantly, Detective, have you been able to uncover any leads yet?"

"We have a few," he began slowly, carefully, "but..."

"But you're not allowed to discuss them with me, is that correct?" she finished for him.

"My apologies, your Highness." Suzaku gave her a rueful smile, taking in the slight hunch in her posture, the hints of bags under her eyes and the way they were pinched at the corners, barely concealed by her makeup. "How have you been holding up?"

"As best as I can." She sighed, and motioned for him to follow her. They wound up sitting on a stone bench under the shade of an orange tree; he gripped the edge, grateful for the coolness there, and crept his hands along whenever it disappeared. "I wasn't that close to him, but still - he was my eldest half-brother. And he was never unkind to anyone. It's rather difficult to make sense of it all."

He supposed Gino already told her this, but it wouldn't hurt for her to hear it again: "I'm very sorry for your loss."

Euphemia nodded, smiling gratefully, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. "I suppose he's in a better place now," she whispered.

Suzaku made a noncommittal sound, halfway between a grunt and a sigh. He could have stood to be more polite, he knew, and he probably_ should _have. But he supposed he was the last person to talk to about such things, although he appreciated the sentiment. "...That's a really nice necklace," he commented instead.

"Hmm? Oh, thank you!" She beamed, and touched the item in question - the chain was gold and stood out against her pale skin and white dress, but so did the pendant. Now that she held it up to the light, he could finally see what it was - gold as well, its shape was symmetric but slightly odd, an old symbol perhaps; a sigil of some sort? "It's rather precious to me."

"Is that so?"

He figured she would elaborate if she wanted to, and he waited for her to do so. "I got it from the first boy who ever really loved me."

"That's nice." There was just so much affection in that voice that he couldn't resist a smile. He also couldn't resist asking, somewhat boldly, "Your boyfriend?"

Euphemia shook her head insistently, actually laughing at that - as though it were absurd. "No, not at all." She let go of the pendant, allowing it to fall back onto her skin, and sighed wistfully. "Though, at that time - I didn't really know the difference." She shrugged. "We were so young. It was innocent, you know?"

"Right." And there was no missing the hint of regret that had seeped into her tone then. "What happened?" This was when Suzaku finally realized, several minutes too late, how_ rude _he probably seemed, and he amended quickly: "If you don't mind me asking, of course - your Highness, I do apologize - "

"Don't." She shook her head again,_ don't be silly. _"And, well - things happened." She bit on her bottom lip - pink, somewhat glossy in this light. "He went away."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Suzaku sighed and looked away, and he was also sorry he asked. "Sounds familiar."

"What's this?" She sounded almost teasing then. "Someone left you as well, Detective?"

How did he keep winding up having these conversations? "More like_ I _left_ her._" He swallowed, and glanced up; he wondered if Gino was done by now, but it would be far too impolite to leave at this point. "We were engaged, once."

"And?" she pressed.

"And," he shrugged, "she called it off." Funny. He imagined it would have hurt more, to talk about this. It certainly hurt more when Lelouch had asked, that night at the bar, and he'd barely said anything at that. "I suppose she grew tired of waiting for me."

"I'm sorry." Euphemia was no longer looking at him, instead staring at her hands folded on her lap. "I didn't mean to bring up sad memories."

"It's quite alright." He paused, surprised at how easy_ that _came out too. "That just makes us even now."

"It does, doesn't it? Though, I believe unrequited love is the mark of a good person."

"I'm not too sure about that..." Suzaku lingered on the thought for a bit, before shaking his head. "You're very kind, Princess." He waited until he caught her eye once more, before smiling. "He was a fool for leaving you."

She seemed to delight in that, because the laughter he heard now echoed the laughter that had seeped through Gino's door last week. "And_ she _was a fool for not waiting."

He laughed with her, a bit more weakly. "No, I...I think she made the right choice."

"Oh, now you're just being too hard on yourself!" She actually hit him on the arm, lightly and playfully, and he pretended it hurt. Then she laughed again, before settling down with a sigh. "Unless - is there someone else, now?"

"Ah." Suzaku looked away and stared at the grass, trying to steer his thoughts_ away _- only to find it was far too late. "That's - that's complicated."

"Oh dear. I'm intruding now."

"No, it's not that." He shook his head. "It's just..." Pale skin and crisp collars and raven hair, fingers gliding with_ his _gliding over ivory keys as they played a nocturne he'd once learned for someone he once thought he'd spend the rest of his life with and - and things changed and - was he actually entertaining this thought right now? Was he_ really?_ "There might be. I don't know. But...I shouldn't."

She tilted her head, some of her endlessly wavy hair spilling over her shoulder. "Why not?"

Why not, indeed. Where would he even begin? How he barely knew this person (how he barely knew this_ man._) How he didn't have time for any of this, how this was all ridiculous at best. How Lelouch couldn't seem to spend ten minutes with him without utterly confusing him and yet - and yet. "Many, many,_ many _reasons."

"The way I see it," Euphemia mused after a thoughtful pause, "it's right if it_ feels _right. Life's really too short to worry about anything else."

She said it in such an unassuming, carefree manner...and yet, something about the words_ stuck,_ taking root in some recess of his mind and refusing to go away. "You think so?"

"You're welcome to your own opinion, Detective." He looked at her, and she met his gaze with a slight shrug and a dimpled smile. "Though, I suppose I'm not being much help; I don't even_ know _her, after all."

Suzaku didn't dream of correcting her. "No, you've been an immense help." She_ had,_ he realized then, and somehow - somehow the thought of that was slightly frightening. In any case, he figured it was about time he went back for Gino, and so he excused himself and stood up then, offering another bow. "Thank you for your time."

"You're more than welcome to it." Euphemia nodded, and added softly: "Good luck."

He didn't ask her what that pertained to, simply took her hand and planted a soft kiss against her knuckles, to which she smiled brightly and wished him well.

Suzaku jogged the rest of the way back, pointedly ignoring the stares from the household staff he passed by. But even as it took him barely five minutes to retrace his steps, Gino was already waiting for him, leaning against the passenger's side of his car.

"There you are." He grinned, and looked relieved. "I was starting to wonder if you'd ditched me."

"I wouldn't." Suzaku smiled by way of apology, and let him in. "How did it go?"

"About as well as I'd expected."

"Ah. So, terribly."

"For someone who doesn't particularly suspect anyone, she sure has a lot of nasty things to say about her dead brother." Gino sighed, hints of frustration leaking through his smile as he buckled his seatbelt. "Him, me, and our agency in general. English has entirely too many insults, you know?"

He chuckled. "Such as?"

"Eh, I'll show you my report later. For now, I need a drink." He sighed and leaned back into his seat, rubbing his eyes. He stifled a yawn. "You finally staying on the wagon now, or are you gonna join me?"

And he thought then that he really shouldn't. Or, that there were so many bars in Pendragon, and there was no particular reason he had to keep revisiting_ that _one. But:_ life was too short,_ and there were far worse things he could regret. "Why not?" he shrugged, starting the engine and pulling away from the mansion, heading for_ Arthur's Castle._

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Author's (end) notes: Thanks for reading! More Pianolouch next week, hopefully that's a good thing! :D


	9. when you realize

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(13) 'Some Enchanted Evening'**_

The smoke, the dimness, the muted drone of chatter that flooded his senses the moment he entered the bar shouldn't have made him feel as though he were coming home, but it did.

It shouldn't have made him feel anything: walking in, or noticing immediately that there was no music, and spying the piano only to find it empty. But it _did_, and for the life of him Suzaku couldn't decide if this filled him with relief, or with longing.

"Welcome back." The same waitress from last week was all smiles as she approached their table. She raised an eyebrow at Gino when he gave her a wink, and then she turned to him: "We haven't seen you these past few days."

It was an innocent comment - that was all it was, Suzaku told himself. "Ah. Work," he said lamely, which wasn't entirely untrue. He decided not to tell her, however, the real reason he'd been clocking later and later hours at the office, and couldn't help a part of him that felt there was something beautifully circular about this whole thing.

"Well it's good to see you," Shirley quipped (he got the name from Gino while they ordered their drinks; at least _one_ of them remembered it) before heading back to the counter. "Some of us were starting to fear the worst."

He didn't get to ask, after that. Because it was another person who brought their drinks, and when he looked back up - realizing he'd been staring at the piano - the detective in front of him was no longer smiling.

"Ah, look. I'm sorry if I dragged you back here." Gino was looking at his beer as though it had somehow wronged them both. "I wasn't sure if you were trying to quit, or - "

"It's fine." Suzaku shook his head and waved that away with a chuckle. The thought of quitting or even cutting back hadn't crossed his mind, really, although it wasn't too difficult to see how Gino would arrive at that conclusion. Still, Gino didn't know about what had happened with Lelouch, nor did he know about the emergency stash Suzaku kept in his second desk drawer; the most wonderful thing about vodka was how you could mix it with coffee and have it not leave a trace on your breath. God bless it. "Cheers."

They clinked their glasses together, and this was still better: cold vodka sliding down his throat and leaving a trail of fire in its wake, tempered only by the slightest kiss of lime. So much better.

Naturally, he drained his glass before Gino had even broken through the foam of his own beer. "So," he began, immediately deflecting the pointed look Gino sent his way. "What's the plan for tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow I have to talk to Dr. Asplund." Blue eyes trailed away from his only long enough to rake appreciatively over a woman sitting at the counter with a black dress. "Lloyd Asplund," he clarified, raising his glass with a grin when she caught him staring. "You knew him, right?"

Suzaku's mind flashed back to that meeting they'd had at the agency, when Lloyd's name came up and he'd let it slip, unintentionally, that it was not an unfamiliar one. "He's coming to the office?"

"Nope, I'm going to his." Gino shrugged. "He holds a faculty position at Colchester. Want to come along again?"

"Yes, please. Anything to get out of the office," he mumbled. Colchester University's main campus was about a forty-five minute drive from the city proper, so any interrogation worth its salt would probably take up half the day. But he wanted to see Lloyd again; the man had been kind to him, sometimes to the point that it was almost detrimental (and there was one incident in particular lingering in his head). He was curious to see how he'd held up, after all these years.

"Sounds great! We leave right after lunch." The lights dimmed even more then, and some of the patrons on the other side of the bar began to clap for whatever reason, so Gino had to raise his voice. "Of course this means we're taking your car."

Suzaku shrugged, fiddling with his empty glass. "I don't mind." He caught sight of Shirley passing by, and asked her for a refill. She seemed more than happy to take the glass from his hands.

"Also, Anya might be coming."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." And it was a bit disconcerting to see a grown man waggling his finger, but Gino tended to fancy himself a stubborn exception to all of these unwritten rules. "So if there's anything in your glove compartment unfit for a lady's eyes, I suggest getting rid of it tonight."

He found himself actually laughing at that, but it was drowned out by an even louder applause, which was when he finally decided to turn around and see just what all these people were clapping for.

He got his answer from cherry red lips, a spotlight on the piano and the stool beside it, in front of which a microphone had been set up. "Evening, ladies and gentlemen," came the playful greeting, met with hushed applause and a couple of whistles. "Here's one for the lovers out there."

Oh but Millay was a vision in red. The clinging velvet flowed as though poured onto her body, the curve of her breasts, her narrow waist. The swell of her hips. The slit opened to an alarming expanse of flesh when she crossed her legs: flawless as the rest of her, ending in lethal black high heels that matched her gloves.

"Hot damn that's hot," Gino mumbled, not too intelligently, over his beer.

Suzaku nodded in agreement. But he'd _seen_ Millay before, enough of her so that he never had to use his imagination ever again. And it wasn't her he was looking at now.

_"A little shy, and sad of eye..."_ (Millay always sang well. But tonight in particular, she did so as though she were making love to the microphone. Or maybe...) _"But very wise was he..."_

He never finished that thought, what with his eyes sliding over to the pianist who was backing her.

Lelouch was wearing a suit, all black save for the shirt inside, dark red (to match, perhaps?) and the white of the cigarette set between his lips, smoke trailing to the ceiling. His music was more subdued tonight, relatively unfussy chords and embellishments that gave Millay's voice more emphasis, and allowed him to take a hand off the keys and flick some of the ashes from his cigarette into the ashtray sitting atop the piano from time to time. He was wearing a bowler hat too; it anchored his hair needlessly, but it didn't obscure his eyes.

Which was either a good thing or a bad thing, because just before Millay went for the high notes Suzaku could have sworn Lelouch stole a glance his way.

_"The greatest thing you'll ever learn..."_

(And there - had that been a smile?)

_"...Is just to love, and be loved in return."_ Millay laughed and blew a kiss as one of the patrons presented her with a drink, and with that she tipped her head and glanced back at Lelouch: "Take it, darling."

It must not have been in the plan, for Lelouch to ad lib what would have been the entire second part of the song. But he did it anyway, only nodding once before attacking the keys with a renewed vigor. And yes, _this_ was what he was more familiar with, nimble fingers dancing over the keys, the rhythmic tapping of his foot, sustained notes held with deliberation and coupled with the slightest swaying of his head.

Suzaku watched him the whole time, through the haze of smoke, even as Shirley reappeared and presented him with another vodka gimlet. His hand wrapped around the glass on instinct - it was cold to the touch, but he didn't drink it yet.

The glass never left the table, because once Millay finished hers and began to sing again, Lelouch glanced at him once more, and held it longer this time.

"That guy's pretty good, isn't he?"

"Yeah." Suzaku swallowed, tasting water and the edge of lime. He brought a hand up to his lips, subconsciously. Touching them. All the while, Euphemia's words from earlier that day echoed in his mind, a kind of afterthought to the lyrics Millay was singing.

Somehow, on a certain level, they were saying the exact same thing.

_"And be loved,"_ Millay injected several runs into that word, her voice dipping high and low effortlessly, _"in return."_ And she ended the song without resolving it, leaving Lelouch to do so with a slide.

Within a minute she was showered with applause and drink offers, enough tequila to fill a whole bottle. To his amusement he saw _Gino_ was among those enthusiastic patrons, but he looked up only in time to see the pianist squashing what was left of his cigarette into the ashtray, and then quietly making his exit.

Suzaku frowned. Were they only doing one song?

Whatever possessed him to scribble a quick note on a napkin to Gino, it was the same thing that possessed him to get up, down his drink in a single swig and leave just enough money on the table before heading the way the pianist had gone. Lelouch had a bit of a headstart by this time, but Suzaku was still surprised when he passed the edge of the counter, the two empty tables below the staircase (he still had no idea what was on the second floor of this building), the bathrooms which always seemed to be occupied. There was a small kitchen at the very end, old and cramped and a bit dirty; the girl working there had ringlets trapped in a hairnet, and didn't even look his way as he passed by.

The only thing left to try was the back door. Suzaku opened it without a second thought and blinked, the light from the street lamp a rather jarring change from the interior of the bar.

Long before his eyes adjusted, though, he had already seen the pianist leaning against the rear wall of the building. "Well. Aren't you a sight for sore eyes."

Suzaku didn't know what to say to that right away, so he just bit down on his lip as the door shut automatically, leaving them both outside. Up close, Lelouch looked ...somewhat _tired_ tonight. His posture gave it away, as did the tightness around the corners of his eyes. He'd left the bowler hat somewhere inside, and there was another cigarette between his lips - unlit, this time.

"That..." He snapped his mouth shut. What, exactly, was he going to say? "That was very good, in there." A pause. "You really do play very well."

Lelouch shrugged. "Thank you."

The passing breeze did absolutely nothing to clear his head. This was a mistake. He should go back inside. He should. "What are you doing out here?"

"Hmmm." The pianist hummed around his cigarette, straightening up a bit. A ghost of a smile played over his lips. "Waiting."

"Waiting," he echoed. Waiting, and he should have left it at that, but - "Waiting...for what?"

"For a light. Or..." The unlit cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke, until Lelouch removed it himself and fixed the detective with a gaze that positively burned: "For you to come over here and give me what that look promises, Suzaku."

For what it was worth, Suzaku would use a number of things to justify it, in retrospect - a test, he supposed, to himself. Or perhaps it was the alcohol, lingering in his blood when he hadn't had _that_ much in a short time this whole week. Or perhaps it was the smoke, or the fatigue, or just Euphemia and _that damn song_ refusing to dislodge themselves from his mind - but no matter what it was, it worked: Suzaku closed the gap between them in two strides, shut his eyes and pressed his lips against Lelouch's before he completely lost his nerve.

...And the world didn't end.

Nor did he find himself repulsed and recoiling within the second, the part of him that insisted this was wrong and crazy and ridiculous triumphant in its foresight. No, it felt...it felt _right_. It felt right when he felt Lelouch's lips moving against his own, Lelouch's breath breaking against his, Lelouch's hands sliding inside his coat to run up and down his back.

It felt more right than anything had this past week.

By the time he pulled back, Lelouch was smiling, staring at him in a way that made his insides knot around themselves, belying any of his previous exhaustion. "Took you long enough."

Suzaku shook his head weakly. "I think I might be losing my mind."

"Oh?" Lelouch chuckled. His hands moved even lower, and he pressed several kisses against Suzaku's neck, trailing them up to his ear. "You know there's only one way to find out for sure."

His whisper sent shivers down Suzaku's spine. "What's that?"

When the pianist replied, he could _hear_ the smile in his voice: "Follow me."

And perhaps Suzaku's biggest mistake that night was that he did just that.

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Author's (end) notes: Millay is singing Nat King Cole's _Nature Boy _up there, just in case you wanted to know.

Shorter update than usual today, but *grins* I hope you all liked it anyway! (Pianolouch certainly did?)


	10. the truth

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(14) 'Heartbreak Hotel'**_

His shirt smelled like Lelouch and sunshine.

It wasn't hard to explain, really. Thirty minutes ago he'd drifted awake to the faint sound of traffic from the street below, and to slivers of light leaking in through tightly drawn curtains.

And: _these weren't his sheets_, and _this wasn't his bed_, and _this most definitely wasn't his apartment_.

"Good morning." It was that voice that finally cleared the fog from his mind - or made it worse, he didn't know. It was hard to tell. "Rather, what's left of it, I suppose."

Suzaku sat up then, allowing the blankets to pool around his waist.

These were the things he remembered: that the wooden stairs within the bar and the winding metal staircase from the rear of the building led to exactly the same place. A heavy door was unlocked by a key Lelouch wore around his neck, the silver chain hidden under his shirt; inside, two more, and one of them, it seemed, never to be opened. A short laugh came before a comment on how 'convenient' the pianist's living arrangements were, before Lelouch had shut the door and shoved him against it and claimed his lips in a demanding, feverish kiss.

(It was mostly a blur, after that. But he did recall endless alabaster skin, half-lidded violet eyes and lips that glistened, warm against his neck. His hands finding delicate wrists and pressing them against the mattress; legs wrapped tightly around his waist. And a voice that was only as familiar as it was low and soothing, soft and calm and _reserved_, as it was now, several hours ago was anything but. _"Suzaku...!"_) "...Is that my shirt?"

Lelouch smiled. The white fabric was rumpled and swam on him, and unbuttoned it left a strip of his torso bare. "I was cold. It was within reach," was all he said, as he shifted and turned until he was lying on his side, facing Suzaku.

He didn't miss the momentary wince there. "Are you all right?"

The response began with a chuckle. "Better. Better than all right."

Suzaku bit his lip. "...I didn't hurt you?" he pressed, unable to help a twinge of guilt.

Lelouch shrugged. "Pain is a thing of beauty." He finally opened his eyes; they were just as arresting, and didn't draw his gaze so much as _demand_ it, even from behind a curtain of tousled hair. "Well? Are you staying or leaving?"

(_"Slow down." A breathless chuckle. "I'm not going anywhere."_)

He swallowed back the memory.

"I'm driving to Colchester at noon," he said, and barely even remembered that now. Damn, he had promised Gino, hadn't he? What time was it, anyway?

"For work?"

"Yeah." He finally found a clock: past ten already, _shit_. He'd always been able to haul himself out of bed just after sunrise, day in day out, save for those disastrous mornings he'd woken up with hangovers from hell. He'd barely had two drinks last night, and yet somehow this was more potent.

(_"Yes." Lelouch gripped his shoulders hard enough to bruise. "Right there. God yes - "_)

"You should go." Lelouch spoke for them both when he said this, and his tone was carefully neutral. Still, Suzaku felt his eyes on him, and it made his skin prickle. "Wouldn't want you to be late."

"Yeah." It seemed that was all he knew how to say. Suzaku pushed himself off the bed without further comment, eyeing the mess of clothes on the carpet. Buttoning his pants, he found his tie dangling off the back of a chair. To get to it, he had to sidestep a lamp on the floor, and ah - had that been his fault?

"Suzaku." He didn't turn around; he was struggling with his belt when he heard Lelouch's voice again, as well as the flick of a lighter wheel. He would have said something about smoking first thing in the morning, if he didn't so badly want a cigarette himself.

God damn it. His coat, where was his coat...?

(_A surprisingly tender kiss on his eyelid, and fingers threading through his sweat-matted hair. Soft words coaxing him to sleep._)

But this was it, right? He'd finally _slept with_ Lelouch, so perhaps... it was about time he got over this little obsession, or whatever it was he was supposed to call it. He would walk into _Arthur's Castle_ in the coming days and be civil with him, and nothing more. After all, this was the last time, and it would be their little secret.

He was certain he'd had better; only, none of those encounters seemed to come to mind right now.

He shook his head. That didn't matter. What mattered was that this was over, and _he_ was over Lelouch now, surely -

"Suzaku." When he heard his name again, it seemed suddenly much closer, and before he knew it Lelouch had draped his shirt over his shoulders. He'd wrapped himself in the blankets and pushed the cigarette off to the very corner of his lips. "I don't regret anything that happened last night. Far from it. I trust neither do you."

Suzaku tensed. Lelouch was speaking with his lips very close to his neck, and it was hard to suppress a shudder. 'Regret' wasn't even remotely close to what he would use himself, if he was going to be honest. But honesty was the same as weakness, in times like this. "What if I said I do?"

He heard a soft chuckle, and caught a whiff of smoke. "It's a bit late for that now."

"I - "

Whatever he was going to say next yielded to the cigarette forced between his lips, and a hand lifting his chin. He coughed, sending errant clouds of smoke to the ceiling as Lelouch sucked a bruise onto his neck, slowly. Thoroughly.

"You know where to find me." The words lingered in his mind long after Lelouch made his way to the bathroom, and he heard running water through the door.

Suzaku didn't leave his coat this time, but as he locked the door behind him he realized a part of him wouldn't have regretted _that_, either.

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_**(15) 'Mack the Knife'**_

He walked into the agency's lobby at half-past eleven, courtesy of the three parking tickets he'd found on his windshield that morning.

As luck would have it, though, it wasn't Marika who was the first to greet him (of course) but: "Well, now isn't _this_ interesting." There was a glint in Luciano's eye as he stopped beside the coffee maker. "I haven't been on a college campus in years, but correct me if I'm wrong: this is what they would call a 'walk of shame', yes?"

Suzaku made a face. He was still in yesterday's clothes, after all, and he'd left Lelouch's place without once looking at a mirror. He probably looked like hell. "I wouldn't know. What do you want, Detective Bradley?"

"Oh, a number of things. Most of them questionably legal." He chuckled, before producing a decently thick stack of papers and all but shoving them Suzaku's way. "And, to give you this."

"'This'," he repeated, biting back a sigh. There was one staple in the top left corner that valiantly held, and puncture holes from several other attempts that had clearly failed. The front page was really enough, though, and he skimmed over it once before comprehending. "...Ah."

"We're at least making _some_ headway, which should be just enough to not have Bismarck yelling over the weekend." Luciano filled his mug and continued in a careless drawl. "Most notably: Clovis is off the hook. He has at least fifty eyewitnesses who swear he was doing a sketch of Guinevere and her husband-to-be at the time of the murder."

"Which matches his alibi."

"Right. And of course this means the happy couple is clear of suspicion as well."

"Hmmm." It made sense, in a way, that Luciano had taken it upon himself to do the research on the royals - it was _his_ theory, after all, that predicted their culprit would be among Odysseus' half-siblings. But from the summary on the front page, listing each of the Emperor's children by birth order, it seemed most of them either had solid alibis, or weren't anywhere near the mansion at the time of the murder. One was overseas, several left early, and - Suzaku winced as he read Luciano's blunt note after the unnamed eleventh Prince: _'kicked the bucket thirteen years ago, apparently.'_ He shook his head. "So from the Royal Family, that really only leaves..." He frowned. "Princess Euphemia. And - "

"And your _client_." Luciano finished for him, drawing out the last word in a mocking sing-song. "I think it would be nothing short of hilarious if it turns out he was the guilty party all along."

Suzaku scowled at the paper, at Euphemia's and Schneizel's names circled in red. "He's _our_ client."

"No, he's yours." The other detective thrust an arm out at him - the one that was holding the mug, and he very nearly ended up spilling coffee all over Suzaku. "And I use the term very loosely."

"What?"

"Haven't been to your office yet, I see. Oh, right - walk of shame." Suzaku's eyebrows slid together in a frown, but by now Luciano was already walking away, carelessly waving. "Enjoy Colchester, Detective Kururugi. Oh, and about what I said earlier - I do want many things, but now I'll have to add Schneizel being guilty to the list." He paused at the door to his office, a particularly sinister grin gracing his features. "Just to see the look on your face."

He didn't have the time or the energy to fire back a retort to that, and so he simply walked to his own office, flipping through the pages as he opened the door.

He'd barely hung his hat and coat on the rack, though, before he noticed something on the mess of his desk that certainly had _not_ been there last night: a medium-sized paper bag, unassuming at first sight, parked right next to the telephone.

He knew it couldn't be so simple, though, and it seemed even less likely when he saw the silver gift box inside.

_'Both regretful and impressed to hear you'd quit smoking,'_ the flowing cursive read, rich and jet black against the expensive stationery. _'Perhaps this will be more to your liking then; from one soldier to another, there's no denying some vices are more difficult to get rid of than others.'_

Suzaku put the note aside for a couple of seconds, just enough to lift the lid off the box. Inside, sitting snugly in carved-out hollows in the raised velvet, were two shot glasses and a sparkling crystal bottle of the finest gin this side of the Atlantic.

"...I hate gin."

For some reason he felt the need to announce this to his empty office. Of course there was no reply; it would have been terrifying if there was. Sighing, Suzaku pried the bottle out and held it up to the light: 104.6 proof. Unopened. A shame it wasn't anything else.

Unfortunately, the note went on: _'I'd like to meet with you to discuss your progress on the case as well. Monday, eight-o'clock. My chauffeur will fetch you at your office.'_ A signature at the bottom, as well as an all-too-familiar family crest right below it, sealed his doom.

"Recorded." By the time he noticed the flash of light, he was already blinking it back. "I think I'll call this one, 'Three seconds at the gates of Troy'."

"Anya." He didn't even remember leaving his door open, but the sight of her leaning against it, already wearing her coat and tucking her camera back into a satchel, proved otherwise. He blinked again, realized he was still holding the bottle of gin, and slammed it back down into the box, almost breaking one of the two. "This was a gift. I swear. It's not even opened - "

"I know. I saw the man who dropped it off." She waved away his protest and sauntered inside. Anya had always been a woman of few words, and today was no exception. "You just missed him."

Suzaku let out his breath as he stuffed the whole thing back into the paper bag. As it was, nobody knew he kept alcohol in the office, and he wouldn't have that changed by something as stupid as _this_. He had far more things to worry about. "Prince Schneizel?"

"No." Anya shook her head. "Shorter. Thinner. Strange hat. Some kind of hand injury." A pause. "He didn't leave a name."

"That's inconvenient." He didn't have to, though; Suzaku could already see Kanon's face clearly in his mind. He wondered if the man had told Schneizel about their little encounter at Odysseus' mansion. But what did it matter? "Did he say anything else?"

Anya shrugged, staring off to the side as though she were trying to remember. "He looked angry?"

"Right." Suzaku imagined he would be. Sighing, he rolled down the top of the paper bag, lifted it, and nodded at her. "You want this? I hate gin," he repeated, in case she hadn't heard him the first time.

"I think Detective Bradley likes gin."

"He would." Suzaku placed the box into his bottom drawer and slammed it shut, thinking. Bismarck had been more than happy to take the cigars off his hands, but he wasn't a very big drinker. "Where's Gino?"

"Waiting outside. I'm supposed to come pick you up," she walked forward then, withdrawing something else from the same satchel, "and leave this with you."

...The second time today, really. He turned over the sealed, unmarked yellow envelope in his hands before catching her eye. "Do I at least get a hint?"

"Prints. From the party. Duplicates from a number of sources." Anya glanced at her watch then, shaking her head. "But you can look at them later. Now, we have to go."

"Wait - !"

If she hadn't completely ignored him and pulled him out from behind his desk by his wrist, he might have argued more. But he barely had time to grab his coat and his keys from the side of the door, which left the envelope he'd just been holding to fall to the floor, its spilled contents going completely unseen.

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Author's (end) notes: I am actually not sure as to whether the content in (14) warrants an 'M' rating, if only for this chapter. If you think it does, let me know. I'll change the rating, or put up an extra warning up front at least.

As always, thanks for reading! Reviews make the author a happy child.


	11. in what they say

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(16) 'Careless'**_

Suzaku could no longer remember why, but he'd always imagined Colchester was one of those college towns, with the university and its offshoots anchoring the area, and businesses sprouting around as an afterthought to establish the city. It wasn't quite like that, he learned: the campus itself was a bit of a drive away from the city proper, and barely looked anything like it. More than once Suzaku found himself letting up on the gas pedal as they paused to stare at magnificent old buildings, flanked by sprawling trees that were even older.

But that wasn't what they came here for. Neither, he supposed, was gawking at strange scientific implements, but after about the thirtieth flash from Anya's camera, and with Gino _this_ close to poking the lens of a tabletop microscope, Suzaku was about ready to give up and join them.

That was, until the door burst open and in waltzed a man he hadn't seen in almost six long years.

"Lieutenant!" Even Lloyd's voice hadn't changed, the way he couldn't say anything without seeming as though he were infinitely pleased with himself. "And here I thought you'd died in that messy affair back in Paris."

Suzaku laughed slightly, for despite the dark humor that voice brought back lighter memories. Lloyd Asplund had traded his military uniform for collared shirts and a lab coat whose ends almost reached the floor. He nodded at the young woman who'd trailed in behind him, and she returned his greeting with a smile. "Dr. Asplund. It's been awhile."

"Mmmm now there's an understatement if ever I've heard one." Lloyd laughed and leaned forward, peering at him curiously. "Last time I saw you, you were up for a promotion. Captain, is it then?"

"...Major, actually." One more, one more person who had to ask this question - "It's just 'Detective' now, though..." - and one more instance in which he gave this standard reply.

"Aha! Congratulations!" Lloyd looked positively delighted, and he was still smiling when his eyes finally fell onto the other occupants in the room. "Colleagues of yours?"

They exchanged introductions and small talk then: Gino and Anya, the agency they represented, the weather back in Pendragon and the uneventful ride. The woman's name was Cecile, they learned, and Suzaku made a mental note to check if the name appeared on the guest list after driving back to the office later.

"Well, don't keep me in suspense, now. To what do I owe the honor of having _three_ detectives coming here all the way from Pendragon?"

"Ah, we were actually hoping _you_ would honor _us_," Gino quipped, melting easily into that professional, practiced (trustworthy) smile; he pulled it off better than anyone, "by answering a few questions."

A strange look flitted briefly over Lloyd's features then, but Suzaku couldn't tell if it was one of resignation, or something else. "Oh dear," he sighed. He pulled off his glasses and wiped the lenses on the sleeves of his lab coat. "I was afraid of this."

Suzaku didn't move to get his notebook just yet. In all honesty, he really didn't think this interrogation was going to turn up anything useful. But sentiments like that had no bearing when he was on the clock. "Have you been reading the newspapers?" he asked carefully.

"No, but there are other ways for news to travel." The scientist looked at Gino, then at him, then at Anya who had wandered off to the side and was intently studying a collection of strangely-shaped glassware. "I can hazard a guess as to what this is about."

"Can you?"

"It's not hard." Lloyd offered a careless shrug and something that approximated a laugh. "Prince Odysseus was one of the most famous alumni ever produced by this institution. Not that that's saying all that much, but..." He shrugged again, and drawled, "if you had to count how many times his name is spoken in the faculty lounge nowadays, you'd give up after the first hour."

"You weren't very close to him?" Gino asked.

Lloyd scoffed. "I exchanged five words with him at a charity ball two years ago. 'How do you do?' and 'Goodbye'. Other than that, no. We haven't spoken since, and I really haven't been keeping up with high society enough to give you any other leads."

Gino gave a short laugh, jotting something down while Suzaku looked on with a smile. But wait a minute: "You weren't at Princess Guinevere's engagement party, then?"

"Oh heavens no. Rubbing elbows with nobility isn't quite as riveting as it's made out to be." At the obvious question that followed, he just tipped his head. "I spent the night here, with tanks and machines. Better company, too."

Gino nodded cordially, taking notes until - "Er, is it all right for her to be here?" he said all of a sudden, flashing the woman an apologetic smile.

"Quite all right." Lloyd waved a hand in front of his face. "Miss Cecile serves a dual purpose, really, something of a post-doc moonlighting as an administrative assistant."

"Or the other way around," she offered.

"Mmm yes nonetheless, I have no qualms about taking questions in front of her. I hope you don't either, Detectives?"

"As long as you're certain of that," Suzaku said then, returning the smile. It didn't surprise him at all to see that Lloyd still didn't give a whit about protocol. It was all pointless red tape to the man, he supposed, and he'd seen it ever since the first day he landed in Paris, gave a stiff salute and had it waved away with an _'At ease, Private. Indefinitely when you're in my presence'_ because _'I hate having to salute back.'_

(At that time, he'd had no idea: that that was the least of the things Lloyd would let him get away with in the months to come.)

"So you weren't very close to the Crown Prince," Gino stated, tapping the edge of his pen against the desk - a simple distraction. It allowed him to study Lloyd's face easily. "But you worked with his younger brother, Prince Schneizel, for a while. Yes?"

"We served in Paris together briefly. My tour ended just two months after his began." Lloyd looked at him. "Detective Kururugi can attest to that."

"Note it," Suzaku said, recalling the morning he waved goodbye to a happily-retiring Lloyd from the harbor...and how that very same afternoon, Schneizel summoned him to his office for the very first time. He wondered, now, if Lloyd had any idea just how close he'd come to...but he decided he'd rather not think about it. "But actually, we were thinking more along the lines of your collaboration outside of the war."

A pause. "Well the Second Prince has regularly provided my department with funding over the years."

"Your department," Anya echoed. She crouched down to take a picture of a whimsical little stool whose seat had been replaced with a bicycle wheel. "Or you, personally?"

Cecile coughed, and Lloyd wore a silly smile. "Well at the end of the day there's hardly any difference, is there? Royal monetary aid for several projects isn't something you just refuse, wouldn't you agree?"

"We agree wholeheartedly." And this was the point Suzaku recognized that Gino was about to make a ridiculous bluff, from the way he stopped fiddling with the pen, leaned forward ever so slightly and stared at the man with intensity that was just shy of unnerving. "We're not interested in those several projects." Gino smiled. "Just the one."

For a brief, terrifying moment Suzaku actually thought it wouldn't work, or that they'd pushed too hard.

But the tense silence didn't last for much longer. "Well you folks clearly did your research," Lloyd mumbled.

Gino blinked, a bit surprised himself, before quickly catching on. "But of course."

"And what, pray tell, does any of this have to do with the murder?"

"We aren't sure yet. But we have reason to believe Prince Schneizel may be the next target. Suzaku was careful not to mention their _other_ theory. "We'd be remiss if we didn't follow every lead, no matter how small."

"Besides," Gino added, "were the Second Prince to fall into any kind of harm, that would seriously jeopardize any arrangements you have now. We can't have that, can we?"

Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long after that before Lloyd heaved a sigh and reluctantly dismissed his assistant. Once she'd left, clearly confused, he sighed again, following Anya with his eyes as she prowled through more of his equipment with her camera in tow. "So. What do you want to know?"

The detectives exchanged a look. "Why don't we start at the very beginning?"

"The _beginning_." Lloyd gave a hollow laugh. "That's going to be difficult. It's hard to tell when any and all of this began, really. I can give you estimates, but to pinpoint a precise date? That's hard."

Suzaku frowned at that. He tried to remember how Lloyd had behaved when he heard Schneizel was being sent from Pendragon to take over command, how _Schneizel_ had acted when Lloyd's replacement arrived, and everything else in between. "You and Prince Schneizel worked together before Paris, didn't you?" he probed.

"I would hope so," he chuckled. "He was the one who insisted I work in the Medical Corps, after all."

He blinked. _That_ much, he wasn't expecting. "How did that come about?"

"The Prince had just joined the army himself when we first met. We were fighting another war back then, and he'd been on the field a grand total of six months. He was young and had a lot to say, but he was three ranks higher than all his peers and he had the family money to burn so," he shrugged, "I thought, hey. Whatever floats his boat."

Gino was scribbling all of this furiously. "And he sought you out?"

"I wouldn't know royalty from my own nurses at the time," he sighed. "Yes, he did."

"What did he want?"

"Prince Schneizel wasn't thrilled about the situation overseas. We were short of manpower and often outnumbered. We hadn't gotten the hang of fighting in enemy territory yet, and it seemed we _never_ would because we were always, always sending men back with Purple Hearts." He sighed. "He wanted me to change that."

Suzaku found himself agreeing with that, to some extent. Granted, Britannia was the one who'd insisted on flying out her men to fight a war on the other side of the ocean, but although he never quite saw the battlefields outside of France he imagined they were all more or less the same: soldiers of every rank and division being shipped back in coffins or on stretchers, missing an arm or a leg or both eyes or some sad combination of those. Perhaps he'd been one of the lucky ones.

Or perhaps it was because he himself insisted on staying; God knew Britannia didn't have anything or anyone for him to come home to, not anymore. "How?"

"I'd been dabbling a bit in animal biology before the war. Adaptive regeneration was a favorite of mine, in particular. This was back when the grant committees let me work on whatever I wanted." Lloyd smiled wryly. "And then the war happened, and all of a sudden it was about better guns and stronger armor and cheaper bullets."

"But the Prince wanted something else?" Gino pressed.

The man nodded. "I'm not sure if it was a pet project of his at the time, or if the revolving-door situation in Europe had just irritated him to that point, but he recruited me because he'd heard of my previous research. He wanted to see if the results I'd obtained from studying hydras and sea stars could somehow be duplicated in humans."

He'd said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it took a while for the implication of that statement to settle in. "Are you saying Prince Schneizel advocated human experimentation?" Suzaku blurted out incredulously. Even Anya looked spooked.

"He wasn't exactly _campaigning_ for it," Lloyd rolled his eyes. "Besides, it's not as if the project ever officially got off the ground."

"Officially," Gino repeated.

"Yes, officially." Lloyd sighed, and glanced at the heavy scribbles on the page of the notebook. "Am I under arrest for this?"

"We're not the police," Suzaku said, eyeing him carefully. He'd handled enough interrogations on his own to tell that Lloyd was one, maybe two questions away from clamming up on them. Still, they'd gotten everything they could pertaining to Odysseus' murder that this man could give several minutes ago, but he would be damned if they were going to leave now. "So let me get this straight. What exactly was the end goal of this research project?"

"In the short term it would have just been a proof of concept. But down the road? We were looking at possibly breaking into regenerative therapy." Lloyd gave him a look. "Soldiers would have been the first beneficiaries, if things had gone well. Casualties notwithstanding, your average gunshot wound just doesn't heal fast enough, if at all before you're deemed useless on the field. A single well-aimed bullet is enough to paralyze a perfectly healthy man from the waist down, and that's _if_ he's lucky. Isn't that ludicrous?"

"I'm aware," Suzaku said, careful not to put too much weight into those words. Noble though the aim was, it was extremely hard not to feel queasy about it with the knowledge that Schneizel may have well indeed called for using humans as lab rats. He was almost afraid to ask out right; it wasn't as though he didn't have more than enough reason to loathe the man anyway. "But things didn't go well, did they?"

"Unfortunately. We abandoned the project after the first trial. Or, if he's found someone else who agreed to do the work for him, I haven't heard of it."

Which was just as well. "Dr. Asplund, would you mind walking us through that trial, in brief?" Gino asked.

Lloyd chewed thoughtfully on his bottom lip, and just when Suzaku had steeled himself for a 'no', "I can do you one better." He pushed his glasses further up the rim of his nose and rummaged through his wallet for a bit, eventually coming up with a frayed business card that had some writing on the back. "I'd written up the results in the hopes that I could still get a publication out of the study, even if it was technically a failure. Oh, but it wasn't meant to be."

They followed Lloyd as he exited the lab and walked leisurely down the hallway, humming an idle tune. It almost seemed as though the interrogation hadn't shaken him at all.

But then again he'd always been like that. "Why wasn't it meant to be?" he prompted, once they were in the elevator.

"Hmmm?" Lloyd tipped his head. "Well the results weren't quite what we were hoping for."

"Inconclusive?" He hoped.

"No, but in hindsight I _wish_ they were."

He'd feared as much. "And you figured nobody wants to read about failure?"

"Oh it isn't that." Lloyd shook his head, laughing, as they got off two floors down. "The higher-ups decided this wasn't a discussion they even wanted to open at all. War is noble and profitable, but only as long as people keep dying. If I'd published this, I would have made an enemy of my own kind, and of housewives and morticians and bright-eyed young recruits, and of everyone who ever owned a company that manufactured _anything_ from buttons to helmets to those little tags on a chain that you wore until someone stumbled upon your corpse and had to bring it back to your commanding officer." He said this all with a smile and a chuckle or two. "Do you still happen to have yours on you, Detective Kururugi?"

He'd flung the blasted things into the Seine before dawn on the day he was to leave Paris for Britannia. "I don't know. They might be in a box somewhere." He laughed weakly. "I'd have to do some digging."

The library in the science building was surprisingly empty, given that it was mid-afternoon on a weekday. Lloyd ushered them past the rows of tables and bookshelves and into a small, dimly lit room that housed Colchester's unpublished research archives. "The university always gets a copy, you see," he was explaining, as they squeezed through tight shelves piled with rows upon rows of softbound research reports, proposals, and rejected theses. Lloyd was glancing at the numbers written on the business card and matching them against those written on the corners of the shelves. "Not that I'm sure why. It's not as though these will ever see the light of day."

"Seems like something of a fire hazard, too," Gino joked.

They finally found the right shelf, and when Lloyd entered the narrow space he very nearly collided with a man who was just leaving. "Ah! Pardon me."

The man said nothing. He merely nodded his head, shifted his grip on the strap of his satchel, and resumed walking.

"Let's see now, 538... 539..." Lloyd skimmed his fingers across the spines as he walked.

"Heyyy, look at this." The bookshelves were like wire in a sieve, and the other two detectives had trailed behind them, somewhere closer to the entrance. By the sound of Gino's voice, it seemed as though they'd found something interesting. "Someone actually made a proposal for, listen to this, 'emergency survival cockpits' for battle tanks. Huh!" There was a flash, off to the side. The man they'd bumped into was perusing the contents the next shelf over, on the other side of the corridor and adjacent to theirs.

"552..." Lloyd stopped walking, and if Suzaku hadn't been paying attention he would have crashed into him. "Mmm. That's odd."

Those words never led to anything good. "What's wrong?"

"It isn't here." Lloyd was frowning at the card, and tapping his finger restlessly against the edge of the shelf. "Unless I took down the wrong... no, I'm sure this is it... I could have _sworn_ - "

Suzaku didn't think anything of it at the time. He'd never even been to this school before, much less set foot in this room, and he had no idea what Lloyd was going on about. He couldn't help if he'd wanted to.

It was either for the best or for the worst, but Suzaku wasn't thinking when he glanced up and saw, through the reflection on the window, the man from before drawing a pistol and aiming it straight at them.

"Get down!" He managed to push Lloyd to the ground and out of the bullet's path, leaving it to shatter the glass of the window. He grabbed as many booklets as he could with one hand and flung them blindly at the shooter before he could fire again. But by the time he'd managed to draw his own gun, the man had bolted, and there were two sets of frantic footsteps approaching.

"What the hell was that?"

"Evacuate the library," Suzaku hauled himself to his feet, off a shell-shocked Lloyd. He whipped out Gino's gun from its holster, through the open coat, and pressed it into his hand. "Protect him. Anya, call the police."

"Who fires a gun in a _school_?"

Suzaku ignored Lloyd's hysterics and stepped over the scattered booklets on the floor. "I'll meet you at the entrance to the building."

"Suzaku, wait - !"

He didn't wait, bursting through the door to the archives. He hadn't heard any more gunshots, but the smattering of people had huddled under the tables in fear. Once he exited the library proper, he barely even saw the man disappear into a door on the other end of the hallway.

It was a stairwell, he learned the moment he went through it. He also learned that the man was already a floor's headstart up, courtesy of the gunshot coming down from above. "Shit!" The shot ricocheted off metal and he fired back two of his own, blind. From the sound of the footsteps scurrying up the stairs, he guessed neither of them connected.

Two full flights of stairs later the shooter scrambled through the door. Suzaku yanked open the same door after a few seconds, only to fall back with a curse once the man whirled around and fired again.

He counted to ten before trying again, half-expecting a bullet between the eyes the moment he stepped into the hallway. He didn't get one, but the man's headstart was much larger now.

Still, it wasn't quite large enough for Suzaku not to see which door he'd next chosen - the door to Lloyd's laboratory. _What...?_

It was a trap, it had to be. He entered the lab with his gun raised and his footsteps slow, cautious. The whine and whirr of Lloyd's machines were slightly more unnerving now, but they didn't explode or otherwise turn on him as he'd feared.

(_"Listen to me. My team as it is now - they're all excellent detectives in their own right, but I hired each of them for a reason."_ Bismarck's words from several years ago were still clear and crisp in his mind today. _"Weinberg has the gift of gab. Nonette's a master of firearms. Bradley's a loose cannon, but show him a knife and a cut from it and he'll give you the killer's height, weight, and which hand he uses to hold a fork."_)

Suzaku found the man again in the office adjoining the lab. The lights were off, but the floor-to-ceiling window let in plenty of sunlight, more than enough for him to see the man rifling through drawers in file cabinets. The first bullet buried itself into cardboard, a mere inch away from the man's hand. The second one wasn't a warning - or, it wouldn't have been, had the said man not whirled around and, in a move faster than Suzaku anticipated, tackled him to the floor.

(_"Your military background is an asset, and not everyone gets a reference like Prince Schneizel. That's a good thing."_ Bismarck nodded at him before sliding the key to what would be his office across the large desk. _"We don't often engage suspects on the field. We try not to. But if it comes down to that, you're going to be the best at it. Keep that in mind."_)

The action sent his own gun clattering off to the side. Here, he finally got a good look at the gunman: pale skin and ice blue eyes, very light brown hair - just a few shades north of blond. His features were pulled into a harsh scowl before he bared his teeth and drew his gun. This, as well, Suzaku was able to get a good look at, when he brought up his arm to block the barrel, struggling to keep it pointed away from him. It looked to be a Webley, not unlike his own, one of the newer designs. Double-action, and with six rounds... he'd used one in the library, two more after that, which left -

The door to the office suddenly burst open then, slamming into the opposite wall. The shooter glanced up, which was just enough distraction for Suzaku to push back with all his strength, slamming the barrel of the gun into the man's forehead. He scooted back quickly once his grip relaxed and kneed the man in the gut, hard.

With his luck, he wasn't going to be surprised if the newcomer turned out to be an accomplice of the gunman. He wasn't, but when he looked up to see who it was he didn't feel any less relieved. "What are you _doing_ back here?" he hissed.

Lloyd was too busy fretting to pay any attention to him. Crouched down on his knees, he headed straight for a drawer the man had already pilfered, prying off the false bottom there. "The key, the key," he was muttering, over and over again. "I can't let them take the key - "

The man had staggered to his feet by now. Panicking, Suzaku rushed forward and slammed him against the wall, knocking the wind out of them both. "Lloyd!" he yelled hoarsely. "Get the _hell_ out of here!"

A sudden kick to the shin sent him stumbling back, hissing. He glanced up through the pain to find himself staring at the barrel of the gun an arm's length away - he still had the gun, _shit_. Suzaku jerked his body to the right, desperately -

(four)

- before he could remember, horrified, that someone had been right behind him. "Lloyd!"

The scientist's pained cry came a split second after the earsplitting _crack_ of the gunshot. He whirled around just in time to see him staggering backward until his back hit the glass of the window. He was clutching at a growing pool of red in his shoulder _(thank God)_ and tucked in his other arm was a small notebook of some sort, with his hand clutching...

Suzaku squinted. Was that a metal flask?

This was the _last_ thing he needed to worry about though, especially when he heard the telltale rustle and planted himself squarely between Lloyd and the gunman. "Stop," he called out, raising his hands defensively. He felt terribly vulnerable without a weapon, but he hoped it didn't show. "Tell us what you want."

The man merely looked at him with narrowed eyes, stubbornly refusing to speak. Two bullets left in that cylinder would be enough to kill both him _and_ Lloyd, but if worse came to worst he would try his best to take them both. He spotted his own gun a few feet away, lying on the floor. It was closer to him than to the gunman; would he be better off stalling for time, or taking a chance? If he moved now...

At that moment, the man's scowl gave way to something else - Suzaku caught the self-assured, positively malevolent smile right before he jerked his arm and fired.

Wide - it was impossibly wide.

But then Suzaku heard the sound of shattering glass, and he realized that the man hadn't missed after all. _"No!"_

He lunged for his gun despite the awful, crushing weight in his chest as Lloyd fell through the window to his death. (And, a harrowing thought as his hand closed over the metal: that had been five, that had been - )

By the time the police finally arrived, one more shot had been fired.

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Author's (end) notes: Long time no see, guys! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this segment ^_^.

(I love Lloyd, actually. I swear I do!)


	12. those who aren't your enemies

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(17) 'Something's Gotta Give'**_

Many things were lost that night, but if Suzaku had to guess, he would say the sense of time was the first to go. As it was, minutes and hours bled into one another, and the only thing remotely close to a cadence they followed in his head was the recurring thought of _oh God oh God oh God_.

Two men were dead today, and it was all because of him.

He still had his head buried in the crook of his arms, atop the table, when the door opened. It was the first time since he'd willingly let himself be locked inside this small, dismally-lit questioning room at the Pendragon police department.

"Still alive?" Bismarck's voice was free of any meaningful emotion, so it was hard to gauge the man's mood. But then he heard something being set on the table - the aroma of coffee drifted its way to his nose not too long after, and he supposed this meant that there was at least _some_ hope he wouldn't be jobless in the morning.

"Disappointed?" he mumbled. When he finally lifted his head, his eyes smarted at the glare. He took in the steaming mug sitting behind the paper cup of untouched, hours-old water. "You shouldn't have."

"Maybe not," he agreed gruffly. He placed his briefcase on top of the table and sank heavily into the opposite chair. "Lord Almighty, this is a nightmare."

"I'm sorry."

"Save it. Weinberg and Alstreim back you up, along with several witnesses from the library. You ought to be thankful."

As far as solace went this was a pittance, but Suzaku didn't say that out loud. "I did everything I - "

"Again, save it." Bismarck sighed. "I wouldn't have done anything different."

Suzaku hesitated. "And the press?"

"Like bloodhounds." Seeing that he wasn't interested in it, Bismarck gladly took the water at Suzaku's side, downing the lukewarm offering in one gulp and crushing the empty paper cup. He withdrew two photographs from an envelope in his shirt pocket then: one a snapshot from an employee file, and the other of the same person in a much more familiar form: his corpse. "The man you shot today? Kewell Soresi, a rising star since his days at the police academy, and one of Gottwald's most trusted point men."

The unsettling feeling that had nagged him all night suddenly became so much worse. "...I shot a cop?" he managed weakly.

"And right in the forehead, instant death." Bismarck tapped a finger heavily against the _other_ photo, black and white (blood always showed up as the former, of course, invoking death and other things), possibly one of Anya's prints. "Though if it counts for anything, he was off-duty today. Gottwald practically swore on his mother's grave that he didn't know anything about Kewell being in Colchester."

"But they can't investigate, because it would still be a conflict of interest, right?" That would certainly explain why none of Jeremiah's men bothered to ask him any questions the whole time he was here. Though come to think of it, the name 'Soresi' seemed to ring a bell. "Is he...?"

"Marika's brother, yes," Bismarck nodded, clasping and unclasping his hand around the remains of the cup. "Took you long enough."

"Oh _God_." Suzaku rubbed his hands over his face, guilt washing over him. "How is she?"

"Not in the best shape. She filed for an indefinite L.O.A. a couple of hours ago."

"Fuck."

"You didn't know. None of us did, until his colleagues identified the body. And besides..." When he next looked, Bismarck was eyeing him carefully. "Kewell was the one who instigated this whole thing, right?"

"I didn't fire until long after he'd started shooting," Suzaku sighed. And despite his efforts, it had still ended with him staring through a broken window, at Lloyd on the pavement below, a bloody mess that sent spatters of dark red all over the first-floor windows. And then: Gino coming up behind a screaming Cecile, throwing an arm over her eyes (_"Don't look!"_); Anya, hesitating with a disturbed look before she finally raised the camera to her eye and snapped the first of many gruesome shots. "For the record."

"It's already on," Bismarck nodded once. "That ought to be enough to satisfy the reporters tomorrow, but no later that that." He paused. "Did you know he was being groomed to join the Royal Guard?"

Suzaku shook his head. "On whose service?"

A stunted laugh. "You get _one_ guess."

He knotted his brows. "Are you serious?"

"This would be a very cruel joke if I weren't." Bismark opened the briefcase long enough to withdraw the slim folder on top, and carelessly tossed it his way. "Prince Schneizel is planning to release an official statement tomorrow, no doubt lamenting the loss of a fine upstanding citizen, and assuring the rest that there's no reason to panic. Textbook."

Suzaku didn't even get past the first page. "You know Dr. Asplund used to work for Prince Schneizel too, right?"

"Right. So on the surface we have two men who would have had the same benefactor, dead following the same incident."

He scowled, remembering the glint in Kewell's eyes when he'd aimed for the window. "That's _not_ how I would phrase it - "

"I'm sure it's not. But it's the line I'm going to feed the vultures tomorrow, and I'll stand by it with a straight face _until_," he nodded at the folder, "you can provide me with the right wording."

Suzaku looked up at his superior's unsmiling face. This would be the second time Bismarck would have to face the press for him with next to _nothing_ to show for himself. All things considered, he supposed he was lucky the man didn't just demote him on the spot, or worse. "I won't fail again," he said, pressing his lips into a thin line.

"Famous last words." But this time the hardened man did crack a bit of a smile. "You're clearly a target now. Make staying alive your first priority. If you can do that, hopefully everything else will follow."

"...Hopefully," Suzaku echoed to himself, softly as Bismarck left the room. Somehow, despite all that had taken place earlier, between that first gunshot in the library, and the moment uniformed offices from Colchester's police force burst through the door, he didn't quite feel the fear for his life creeping in, as he should have. He supposed it had to do with how Kewell had clearly targeted _Lloyd_ and - this was the part he hadn't told Bismarck, or anyone - even after Lloyd fell through the window, Kewell had actually _had the drop on him._ Granted, it had taken less than a second for Suzaku to dive for his gun and fire, but Kewell had already had his aimed and ready.

He frowned, finally sampling the coffee (too watery; too much sugar).

No matter how many times he played it over in his head, he was convinced Kewell could have easily killed him if he'd tried.

Suzaku shook his head, bringing the mug and testing the knob on the door, not all too surprised now to find it unlocked. If what Bismarck said was right, Gottwald couldn't justify holding him here any longer if his life depended on it.

But one look at the mob that had congregated outside made him backpedal and retrace his steps, cursing under his breath.

"Can I use your phone?" He took the trainee's shrug as a 'yes' and dialed home, glancing once at the clock (midnight already? _Shit_) and praying Kallen was still awake -

_"For the last time, I don't know where he is, you goddamn bitch - !"_

"Kallen." _Finally_ something that went his way; a part of him was actually surprised she wasn't part of the mob outside herself, but that could wait. "It's me."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. _"Oh, so you finally decided to call? What happened, did the stars align?"_

He rolled his eyes. "I was held up." He paused then, recalling the hostile greeting she'd opened with. "Who did you think it was going to be?"

_"Nobody important."_ She sighed, and he suddenly imagined her blowing a tendril of hair out of her face. _"I heard you shot someone. Do I have to go apartment-hunting soon?"_

"Hardly." He drummed his fingers against the tabletop. "I think I'm walking, actually." But Gino still had his car (...he _hoped_). He hated having to ask, and the mere thought of doing so prompted a grimace, but... "Would you, ah, be able to come pick me up?"

It took a few more cycles of the usual banter, and persuasion - that he would give her the full story if she would help him get the press off his back _for now_, et cetera, things she wanted to hear - before he hung up the phone and sighed. He could hear the muted drone of Bismarck's voice from here, but he couldn't make out what anyone outside was saying, so he simply headed back to the questioning room out of his own volition for some peace and quiet.

He didn't get thirty seconds of either before the door opened once more, but it wasn't Kallen who walked in. "Detective Kururugi - good, you're still here."

"Monica." He looked up from his coffee, somewhat startled to see the blonde detective there. She'd always been the type to come in at eight on the dot and stay the full eight hours, but even when she put in overtime she never stayed a minute past seven. "What - ?"

"Sorry, I have to make this quick. I only have five minutes." She slid into the chair Bismarck had been sitting in, handing him a very familiar envelope. "Miss Alstreim says you really ought to take a look at these."

"Ah, yeah. I meant to." He took the envelope gratefully and recognized the contents as the prints Anya had given him earlier, before they left for Colchester. "Where is she?"

"Still giving her statement at the office, last I checked."

That probably meant Gino was in the same boat, he mused. Damn. "I'm sorry you had to pick these up, though," he said with a wince.

She blinked. "Come again?"

"The mess, I mean." He looked up, confused to find _her_ confused. "Weren't these scattered on the floor?"

Monica just gave him a look. "They were on your desk."

_What?_ He sighed and shook his head, deciding he had far more important things to worry about. "Thanks. You didn't have to come all the way here for these, though."

"Oh, I'm not here for those." She placed the messenger bag she had slung over her shoulder on the table, and took out two items wrapped separately in brown paper. "Careful. It was hard enough to get them out of Colchester in the first place."

Immediately he knew what he had in his hands, and it only furthered the sickening weight in his stomach when he pulled the paper away and found himself staring down the leather-bound notebook Lloyd had died for. And perhaps it helped that the other bundle was vaguely flask-shaped. "Any idea what we're looking at?"

"There? I'm afraid not." Monica shook her head. "We took a quick look, but the contents are going to require close study for sure."

"Hmmm." That wasn't really too surprising, considering this had been _Lloyd's_. "And this thing?" He asked, nodding at the flask.

"Ah..." She bit her lip, and looked unsure of what she was about to say. "Well the good news is we know what's inside."

His eyebrows shot up. "Yeah?" This was a welcome change of pace, really -

"Yes. It's whiskey."

- But of course, it was too good to be true. "You're fucking kidding me," he blurted out, features falling.

"Well, maybe once we decipher the writings it will make more sense..." She trailed off, though, and couldn't even finish her own sentence without sounding as though she didn't believe it herself. A series of sharp knocks made her jump, and she quickly rose to her feet. "I suppose I have to tear myself away now. Are you keeping all of those, or...?"

"I'll take these." Suzaku pulled the envelope with the prints closer, but he pushed the still-wrapped flask her way. "Take that back, please. I can't imagine I'll find a use for it." Besides possibly draining it in two shots out of sheer spite, he thought, and he didn't even particularly _like_ whiskey all that much.

He sighed and found himself leafing through the notebook once he was alone again. As expected, the pages were filled with lines upon lines of sketches and equations that may as well have been gibberish to him. Lloyd, or whoever wrote this if it wasn't him, had been diligent in writing the date on the top of every new page after a break, and there seemed to be a pattern to them. Spanning most of the recent winter, before ending abruptly in mid-April, they were spaced either two or five days apart, and...

Perhaps he really ought to get a calendar before putting too much thought into this, he told himself. This was after too many minutes spent staring at scribbles and lines and Greek letters, and he rubbed his eyes. What had Lloyd called this? The 'key'? There was also the fact that the other half of this package was a fucking _bottle of alcohol_, and who in his right mind would die for that anyway? Aside, of course, from the obvious _other_ possibility?

It just didn't make sense; _none_ of it did. Every development in this case was starting to feel like one step forward, ten steps back. He closed the notebook and wondered if he could ask Cecile to help them figure out what was in there, but he doubted it; the woman seemed traumatized enough when he'd last glimpsed her before being hauled into a police car.

That was the thought currently brewing in his mind when the door burst open. Kallen didn't even pretend to have _considered_ knocking, simply pushing her way inside, past the flabbergasted trainee briefly visible in the background before the door closed behind her. "Let's go. Your chariot awaits," she said. She was studying his face when he got up. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he lied. Stuffing both envelopes into the notebook, he flashed her a quick smile and headed for the door. Obsessing over evidence that made no sense could wait. "What's it like out there?"

"Terrible, they'll eat you alive. Here." Once again she was already dressed for bed and did little more than slip on a pair of boots and cover up with a trenchcoat, from which she drew a pair of dark glasses from an inside pocket and handed them to him. "Give me your coat."

"What?" He frowned. "Why?"

"Because you make it too easy." At his deepened frown, she rolled her eyes. "It's 65 degrees outside. You have literally _no_ excuse." She smiled when he relinquished it, reluctantly, and transferred the newsboy cap from her head to his. "Let's go."

They managed to slip out undetected, and when he glanced back Bismarck _still_ seemed to be fielding questions from about half a dozen reporters. And it was almost 1 in the morning, at that. "Christ," he muttered, pulling off the glasses as soon as they were both inside Kallen's car. "Persistent lot, aren't you?"

"You people make it necessary." She grinned and started the engine, pulling into the street. "So if we go home now, how are you going to get to work in seven hours?"

He had no idea. "My car's still with Gino. I think," he added, placing the hat in the glove compartment. "I guess I could - "

"No," she said flatly. "You are _not_ inviting him to the apartment."

"I didn't say that," he chuckled, though it came out a bit forced.

But truth be told he wasn't quite keen on the idea of heading home just yet. While the initial shock had worn off, other things had not: things like the sight of Kewell dead as a stone on the floor, with a leaking bullet wound in his forehead; Lloyd, the sickening sound he'd made when he hit the ground, Cecile's voice making his blood freeze - he couldn't imagine how things like those would possibly _not_ lend themselves to a sleepless night, or dredge up _other_, relevant memories.

...At least, not while he was sober.

"A _bar_?" The displeasure was clear on Kallen's face as she pulled up to the intersection he'd given her.

"Sort of." He could give a lame excuse about how this was closer to the office, and how it would be less out of way for Gino to pick him up in the morning if he called, but he decided he'd rather not insult her intelligence. Or his own.

"You realize it's probably close to last call? If not already past it?"

"Yeah, I do." But he needed this - vodka, or something else. _(Something like soft music and softer touches and other things he would deny he was considering in advance, to the death, because sometimes he found that if he tried hard enough, he could lie to himself and fall for it. Or maybe that was wishful thinking as well.)_ Something stronger.

Kallen looked at him sternly for a few more seconds before sighing, heavily. "It's your life. I just won't even say it anymore." She looked out the window. "Do you have a place to crash?"

"I think so. A friend's." He hated how he stuttered over that word. Shaking his head, he reclaimed his coat from the backseat, tossed the notebook under the blanket that was a mainstay there, and smiled. "Hey. I owe you one."

She rolled her eyes. "You owe me well more than that." And it was true, too, but neither of them expounded and she offered a wave - "Don't die, rent's due in three days" - before driving off.

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Author's (end) notes: Sorry for the long wait between updates! But between now and last segment, I've managed to have my (old) laptop die on me, speed-moved to a new place across town, and sprained my ankle (and not even doing anything awesome, either). Also, I lost this segment _twice_, proving there is no learning curve to life.

Hope you all liked it anyway! ^_^


	13. they're the closest

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(18) 'Ain't Misbehavin''**_

Suzaku could hear the faint strains of piano music even from outside the door.

He'd waited until long after Kallen pulled out of sight to climb up the steps to the front entrance of the bar. The 'Closed' sign had long been flipped, but there was still one light on inside the bar, lending a smoky yellow glow to the window. He wondered if any of the waitstaff were still inside, if Rivalz was still counting the day's take behind the counter and splitting the tips. All told, it was quiet, and dead.

Except for...

He couldn't remember what this song was called. All he knew was that he'd heard it somewhere, sometime before - he must have, this familiar _strike_ and _pause_, and _strike_ and _pause_, and _strike-strike-strike_ and _pause_. If music could be hesitant, he imagined this was what it must sound like, although he knew quite well that personifying music wasn't the best use of his mental faculties, or his time. Both of these, and sanity, did seem to be in short supply nowadays.

Suzaku sighed, his hand frozen in place just as he was about to knock on the door.

It was odd, when the pianist himself tended to keep Suzaku on his toes, but - Lelouch's playing never ceased to put a part of him at ease. Even now, he could feel some of his earlier anxiety melting away (or it could just be fatigue, he could have argued). Thoughts of Lloyd and Kewell, and poor Cecile, and a mysterious notebook and a bottle of whiskey came rushing to the surface with that first, slow crescendo, only to be... released with the slide (and pause). And the slide (slower). And again.

(He imagined Lelouch's fingers dancing over the keys then, with that next movement, his eyes closed and his head bobbing slowly with the rhythm. His delicate hands and how soft they were, how fragile they'd felt in his grasp.)

Suzaku swallowed, tearing himself away. Kallen was right, what the hell had he been thinking?

And yet, he found himself not starting the long trek home, or to the next street to flag down a cab. Instead, he pulled his coat tighter around himself as a sudden breeze (and perhaps, something _else_) sent a chill up his spine, and circled around to the back of the bar.

There, that part of the faded brick wall beside the wooden back door, where he'd kissed Lelouch - it was nothing but empty space and a dim light, now.

He shook his head. Maybe this was a mistake. And so was climbing up the black metal stairs to the back of the apartment above the bar, but who was going to care at this point? When he already had the blood of one man (_two_ men, he reminded himself: as far as he was concerned, there was no difference between letting Lloyd die and whirling around to pull the damn trigger himself) on his hands, what was this?

He pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his coat, frowning when he saw that there were only two sticks left inside. Damn.

It took three tries before the wind finally showed some mercy and stopped dousing the flame of his lighter. The rush of nicotine that followed was a bit of relief, but it was temporary and frustrating. It left him wanting more (something else).

And he could still hear the piano music from up here.

It was much softer now, of course. He had to strain his ears to even make out the tune, but it was still there, and _Lelouch_ was still there. He chuckled a little around the cigarette, wondering to himself how it had gotten to the point where the only constant in his life was the pianist at _Arthur's Castle_ and the music he made, in more ways than one.

But what had he said?

_You know where to find me._

Suzaku fingered the spot on his neck where Lelouch's mouth had been, and tried to convince himself it wasn't so bad to want to hold on to _this_, if only because there seemed to be nothing else.

_'Make staying alive your first priority.'_ And yet he'd come so close to failing today, hadn't he? It was sad, that he had to be practically _ordered_ to live.

He cast a glance down at the concrete below. That was a long fall.

By the time he extinguished the cigarette on the railing in front of him, his eyes were smarting and he suddenly longed for home - not Pendragon, not the apartment he shared with Kallen, but _home_, Tokyo and warm sunshine and dew-kissed grass in the morning, Kaguya and the pond behind the Kururugi shrine.

But that was long ago, seventeen long years ago. He'd burnt that bridge with a terse phone call to his father two weeks before he was shipped to Paris, and it was too late to regret anything now.

He thought that maybe he ought to leave now. But it was too late for _that_ as well, when he heard the loud creak of hinges behind him and felt a rush of air.

Then: something cold and hard, jammed painfully into the side of his neck. "Don't move," was hissed into his ear.

Suzaku froze dutifully, slowly raising his hands. After all that had happened today, really, the barrel of a gun against his skin didn't scare him nearly as much as it probably should have.

But he angled his head ever so slightly and saw a familiar silhouette against the far wall. "Lelouch," he said simply. "It's me."

He could feel the pianist tensing behind him, and a few beats passed (he considered asking, 'Are you going to pull the trigger or not?') before he finally relaxed. He pulled the gun away and Suzaku forgot to say 'thank you'. "I thought..." Lelouch trailed off, clamped his mouth shut and shook his head instead. "What on earth are you doing up here?"

Suzaku shrugged, lamely. And, because he was way too tired to lie convincingly now: "I don't know."

Lelouch raised an eyebrow, clicking the safety catch back on. That was a nice gun. The body shone like polished silver, and the handle was something even lighter than that. A 5-round cylinder, .44 caliber - he thought maybe he would have remembered what it was called, had he been less tired. It looked brand-new, too. Briefly, very briefly, he considered asking if it had ever been fired. "You don't know?"

He didn't, he really didn't. All he knew was that he needed some time to _get away_ from everything else, and he needed a distraction that neither vodka nor cigarettes seemed to be able to give him anymore.

(Did that make him a selfish bastard?)

Lelouch started tapping his foot, giving him a look.

(It probably did. He would be sorry for it _later_.)

"I thought I might get to see you." That sounded so much stupider aloud than it had in his head, so he simply shrugged again. "What were you going to say, earlier? 'I thought' ... what?"

The pianist stepped closer, stopping only when their faces were about an inch apart. His eyes were so very close that Suzaku could make out his eyelashes when he blinked, and the way they made the bangs that had fallen in front of his face sway a little, every time. "You look like hell."

Suzaku gave a short, humorless laugh. "I'm sorry."

Lelouch didn't laugh with him. "Do you have something against knocking, like a normal person?"

"I didn't want to disturb you..." _Just like the last time_, he didn't have to say. He didn't want to invoke memories of that night, because God knew how it ended. He knew Kallen wouldn't be so forgiving this time, either. "There's _something_ when you play. Something." Magical, enchanting. "I don't know."

Violet eyes squinted at him. "Are you drunk?"

He shook his head with a mournful laugh. "Jesus no. I _wish_."

Lelouch finally lowered the gun. Suzaku didn't ask, and he didn't offer an explanation either; this neighborhood was far from the safest in Pendragon, after all. But there was a disquieting look in his eyes when he regarded Suzaku once more. "What happened?"

Suzaku just shook his head, again. He could draw up a list, but he supposed if he were Lelouch he wouldn't care for all of that. "You'll probably find out in the morning, anyway," he mumbled, already imagining and dreading the news crews crowded in front of the agency building. "Look, if you want me to go," he sighed, "I'll just - "

Lelouch rolled his eyes. "As if I could let you wander around and get yourself killed in good conscience." He took hold of Suzaku's wrist and tugged.

He smiled wryly. "You didn't seem to have a problem with it last time."

"Last time?"

"You forgot? The night you played bartender for me?"

"Ah, that." Lelouch shrugged. "I'll admit I was expecting something else, at the time."

"Oh?" Suzaku tilted his head. "What were you expecting?"

"It doesn't matter now." Lelouch waved that away and tugged harder, more insistenly. "Come on."

He allowed himself to be pulled into the apartment, almost stumbling at the rise before the door.

It was the same as he'd last seen it: modest, but almost clinically neat, with bookshelves along two walls and a window with the curtains drawn gracing the third. The only sign that the living room had ever been occupied in its existence was a blanket on the long couch and a stack of musical scores left on the coffee table, dog-eared and scribbled over in pencil.

Then again, he'd last set foot in this place less than twenty hours ago, so perhaps it was silly to expect otherwise. (And had so much really happened in so little time?)

"Sit down," Lelouch instructed him. "I only keep gin in the apartment, so I'm not even going to offer." At the face Suzaku made, he chuckled. "Do you drink tea?"

He nodded dumbly. Then he caught himself, and began a pathetic "You don't have to - " but Lelouch had already disappeared into the kitchen.

Suzaku sighed, sinking into a chair at the dining table - not at the head, not the one with the arms. He supposed there was something odd about having a dining table that could seat six in an apartment for _one_, but there were stranger things to notice. The walls were clean but bare, no framed pictures or portraits anywhere to be found. His eyes scanned the apartment and fell upon the second door visible from here, next to Lelouch's bedroom. It was closed, and yesterday it had been locked - it still seemed so, now. Idly he wondered what was behind it. Storage, perhaps?

The pianist returned a few minutes later with a steaming cup, and set it gently down. "Chamomile," he said, before taking a seat at the table beside him.

Suzaku nodded his thanks. "None for you?"

"Hmm. Not at this time, no."

He bit his lip, stared at the wisps rising up from the tea and suddenly felt guilty. He hadn't wanted to impose on the man, hadn't even been thinking of it that way. But if he left now, wouldn't that just make it all the more terrible? He supposed the only thing that kept him from getting up and stuttering a half-baked, clumsy apology was the fact that it was far too late to change his mind.

Once again, it was far too late for a lot of things. "Lelouch..." He ignored the tea and leaned towards him, tentatively...

...Only to have the pianist jerk back, turning pointedly away. "Is that really all you're here for?"

Suzaku faltered, feeling as though he'd been stung. "What?"

Lelouch still had his eyes on the window now, and his voice was low when he continued. "If you think I'm some kind of - "

"No!" Suzaku cut in before he could finish that. _Shit shit shit what the hell?_ "No, that's not it at all!"

Lelouch's gaze snapped back at him, and his eyes were cold. "What, then?"

"I just..." He swallowed, trying to push down the panic that was starting to build. "You really expect me to _answer_ that?"

"Yes." Lelouch said this with a completely serious face, and raised an eyebrow. "Come on, let's have it. This ought to be rich."

"I..." Maybe he was a fool for not expecting this question earlier. Because really, if he came here willingly in the dead of the night, waiting for Lelouch outside his apartment, well - what did that make him? What did that make _Lelouch_? "I can't explain it."

And maybe this question wouldn't have been so hard to answer if he hadn't been pointedly _ignoring_ it every time it came back to haunt him, as it did so often ever since that first time Lelouch stole a kiss from him in front of the bar. No, earlier - that night they'd played the piano together, and he felt _something_ that may or may not have been the alcohol. He still didn't know what it was.

But Lelouch was still waiting for his reply.

Honesty was easier, and it would _always_ be easier.

That still didn't mean it wasn't damn hard.

"When I'm with you, it's..." He lowered his gaze. If he'd actually had any of the tea, perhaps he would have had an excuse for the burning in his cheeks. "It's easier. Not to care about everything else," he said quietly. "It's an escape..." And he hung his head. "Whatever that makes of me."

For the longest time, Lelouch didn't say anything, and Suzaku didn't bother trying to fill in the silence.

And when he stood up, Suzaku didn't raise his eyes either. He chose to stare at the tea instead, trying to think of how it had turned out like this, and how to make a graceful exit. And, how soft Lelouch's lips were when the pianist stopped in front of him, lowered his head and kissed him tenderly.

"...What - " He pulled back and blinked, confused. "I thought - "

"Hmmm." Lelouch moved his head lower and nuzzled on the side of his neck. "You have a way of making things entirely more difficult than they should be."

"But you said..."

"Yes. I just wanted to know if we were on the same page." He chuckled, and there was something there that sounded entirely too much like self-satisfaction. "I never said I had a problem with it. Did I?"

There were so many things he could say to that, and... they would all probably be wrong. He played back their earlier conversation in his head, and hissed in protest when Lelouch's ministrations made that impossible.

"One of these days," he sighed, wrapping his arms around Lelouch's waist in surrender, "you're really going to drive me mad."

The pianist merely purred against his neck. "Truth be told, I'd be disappointed if I haven't _already_, Detective."

And then he stood up, took Suzaku's hand without further ado, and led him to the bedroom.

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_**(19) 'Hello, Stranger'**_

_In retrospect, he was probably not as gentle that night. He had dim recollections of knocking things over - a chair, a small lamp, another chair. In any case, perhaps the only reason he didn't stop or pull away was because Lelouch matched his desperation. Whether it was out of sheer need or some twisted form of courtesy he still didn't know, but Lelouch was just as violent in his own way, his tongue demanding and his teeth sharp. His nails dug into Suzaku's back and grazed down, hard, leaving angry lines of pain that he was so sure would leave marks in the morning._

It was when Suzaku had pushed him up against the wall, for about the third time that night, when Lelouch finally paused for a chuckle. "Impatient."

"...Sorry." He eased back a bit, and loosed his grip on Lelouch's wrists, pinned to the wall above his head, but he didn't let go (yet). Do you want me to - ?"

"Stay. Don't worry." Lelouch's hand slipped beneath denim, leaving fire in its wake. "I missed you too."

Suzaku didn't understand those words, and he wasn't sure he would have understood them any more if they hadn't been whispered into his neck. Then Lelouch's lips trailed up, and teeth found the lobe of his ear, and he decided maybe it wasn't so important after all.

When he drifted awake, it was still pitch-dark.

He was sober enough to remember _where_ he was (thankfully), but the fact that he couldn't quite shake himself to full alertness told him it was probably a couple of hours or so before sunrise. His limbs felt like lead, and he stifled a groan.

Come to think of it, he couldn't quite remember _why_ he'd woken up at all.

A shrill, albeit muted sound from downstairs gave him his answer. _Ah._

Pushing himself up off the mattress, he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was mildly surprised to notice Lelouch still beside him, on his side and facing the other way. He'd drawn most of the blanket to his chest, but when his eyes adjusted Suzaku could see his shoulders and most of his back, so fair it almost seemed just shy of glowing in this darkness. His hair spilled over the pillow like an inkblot refined with a fine brush, and the sheets shifted ever so slightly whenever he took a breath.

He couldn't see the pianist's face from here, but he imagined it looked peaceful.

Another ring from downstairs pierced through his thoughts, and Suzaku sighed before climbing off the mattress.

Two more rings passed before he finally found his pants, and he was struggling into them when another made it to his ears. The shoes would be entirely too much trouble, he thought, and so he simply padded down the stairs barefoot, leaving the door to the apartment ajar and using the creaky wooden staircase that led to the bar.

Still, he heard no shuffling from above, and frowned; Lelouch really was dead to the world. Perhaps he'd greatly tired him out?

He sighed, flipping on a single light switch and ignoring the rest. He picked up the phone and brought it to his ear halfway through maybe the thirteenth ring. "_Arthur's Castle_."

It was a standard way of answering the phone, one he'd learned long before working at Camelot Investigations.

But he couldn't help the sudden feeling he'd done something terribly, horribly wrong, when all he got was a long pause on the other end of the line.

Then: _"Thank you,"_ before a loud click and a dial tone. And it wasn't until a full minute later when Suzaku _fully_ woke up, courtesy of the renewed shiver crawling up his spine.

Because if nothing else, he could have sworn that this voice belonged to the same mystery caller from before.

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Author's (end) notes: So hey, we haven't had a double-segment in a while. Hope you guys enjoyed!

Reviews would be like candy to the author :D.


	14. you'll ever get

Disclaimer: _Code Geass_ – with its characters, settings, and all other borrowed elements here – is the sole property of its creators. Segment titles are titles from various songs, and I don't own those either. For overall warnings and general Author's Notes, see 'chapter' 1!

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_**(20) "Two Sleepy People" **_

Suzaku was more than wide awake when he returned to the pianist's bedroom. In his mind, he replayed that phone call over and over again, hearing the careless drawl over the soft static from the other end: that woman's voice, about as low in pitch as Kallen's, but with none of the emotion.

It was impossible to pin character onto a voice with which he'd exchanged precious few words over a telephone line, but he couldn't shake the nagging feeling that this was important somehow.

His thoughts were only derailed when he felt an arm lacing through his, and a very warm body pressed up against his side. "Trouble sleeping?" Lelouch murmured into his shoulder.

"The phone rang," he answered lamely. "At three in the morning."

"Hmmm?" Lelouch shifted and began planting light, lazy kisses on his neck. "It's almost four."

"I know." He would have to be up in two hours, and with the way things were going, it seemed those would have to be two hours lying listlessly in bed. He wondered if he should just get up now. "Sorry if I woke you. Go back to sleep."

"Who was it?"

That was a very good question. Twice the woman had been able to reach him, and he'd been in two very different locations during those times. He could understand someone calling the agency directly, but the bar was another thing altogether.

Was he being watched?

Stupid question, he realized. Bismarck and Kallen had already warned him as much, and it wasn't as if he particularly minded; he'd had worse (much, _much_ worse) after all.

A better question would have been, was he putting Lelouch in danger by coming here so often?

But Suzaku realized that simply asking that of himself carried with it a whole new set of complicated implications, and he didn't really want to dwell on any of _those_ at all. "Wrong number," he finally said, after realizing the silence had stretched on for far too long.

"Just as well," Lelouch hummed thoughtfully. He stretched out, rather like a cat, the blanket slipping from around his thighs. Suzaku tried not to look, he really did. "Wouldn't want them to call again."

Suzaku shifted uneasily on the mattress. "I guess."

"Besides," Lelouch continued, nipping at Suzaku's ear now. He'd thrown his leg carelessly over Suzaku's waist, slowly retracting it to pull him ever closer. "No rational person would be awake at this ungodly hour."

"..._We're_ awake," Suzaku pointed out.

But Lelouch just smiled at that, before capturing his lips in a kiss. And eventually, Suzaku realized there was no victory in that argument.

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_**(21) 'What a Difference a Day Makes'**_

By the time Suzaku finally got to the agency, it was almost eight in the morning and the sun still had not come out. Not that summer was finally giving any respite, though - any slightest breeze was oppressively hot, the city hazy and humid. More than once Suzaku tugged on his collar and the knot of his tie. He wished it would rain.

He passed Gino's office on the way to his, thought he saw something in the corner of his eye, and frowned. Stepping back, he knocked sharply on the half-open door.

The mass under the rumpled trenchcoat that had been draped over the desk jerked, and Gino blinked up at him groggily. "Oh. Hi." Another blink. "Morning already?"

"Something like that." Suzaku reached up and clicked off the lights in Gino's office before Bismarck could come in and read them the Riot Act for driving up their electricity costs. "Were you here all night?"

"Most of it." Gino rubbed at his eyes. "I hear you got off scot free. Congratulations?"

"Don't say it like that," Suzaku sighed. The way Gino put it, it was as though he had gotten away with murder.

"Well either way it wasn't your fault. Though, too bad he turned out to be a cop." Gino sat up and yawned, stretching his arms up and over his head. "They couldn't have kept you locked up if they tried. Say, are you coming in or just standing there?"

"I'm thinking about my options," he chuckled. "Have you talked to Anya?"

"Until you waltzed in today, I hadn't seen _either_ of you since yesterday's incident." Gino grinned then. "Ever try driving from Colchester at two in the morning? You can make it in twenty."

Suzaku winced. "They held you for that long?"

"Hmmm? Oh, no!" Gino laughed good-naturedly. "I got maybe six questions, tops. Then again, I wasn't the one holding a gun."

"Right."

"I stayed to help that woman - Cecile? She, ah, wasn't in the best of shape, as you can imagine."

"I can," he said soberly, rubbing the pads of his thumb and forefinger together. This early in the morning and he was already itching for a cigarette.

"Well, I just wanted to be sure she wouldn't do anything stupid... _and_," Gino added with a meaningful grin, "I found out something that you might find interesting."

Suzaku processed that for a moment. "You interrogated her? While she was in distress?"

"That's an awful word." Gino pouted. "We had a _conversation_. Anyway, did you know that, the day after _that_ study was officially shelved, Dr. Asplund apparently took out a safety deposit box at a tiny bank across the university?" Gino sifted through the mess of papers and books covering his desk, retrieving an old envelope. He handed it to Suzaku, also beckoning at him to come closer. "Take a seat, would you? This is a genuine consultation, Bismarck won't yell."

Suzaku relented, though he left the door open behind him. "Well..." He took out the contents of the envelope: a letter from the bank, and a very familiar signature at the bottom. From the language of the letter Lloyd had apprently pulled more than enough strings so that the box was given to him on the same day of his request. "Maybe it was a coincidence?" He shrugged. "Maybe he just realized he needed a place to store his valuables, like everyone else, and it happened to be on that day."

"But according to his mother, he already had one." Gino was flipping through the well-worn notebook he always carried with him into interrogations. "Dr. Asplund the elder opened it for his son when he was eighteen, right in their hometown. Supposedly it's been empty since."

"Wait, wait, you spoke to his _family_?"

Gino simply smiled, but it was nowhere near as cheerful as usual. "No siblings; his parents lived just the next town over, so when they heard the news..." He shrugged. "Well, _someone _had to."

Suzaku sighed. In all the time he'd reported to the man, Lloyd had never spoken of his family. Then again, Suzaku himself wasn't one to talk. "So what's in the Colchester box?"

"No clue." Gino bent down, rummaged into a leather bag beside his desk, and unceremoniously dumped a medium-sized metal box right on top of the pile of junk. At Suzaku's dumbfounded gape, he let out a short laugh. "All of Lloyd Asplund's tangible assets went straight to his next of kin - he even left a will and all, very thorough like that. I didn't even have to try to convince them to turn this over to us - anything, I guess, to aid the investigation. Help them make sense of it all."

The box was made of some lightweight metal - aluminum, it seemed - and was about twice as long as it was wide. "You think Kewell killed him for this?"

"I don't know. We can speculate all we like, but we can't say anything for sure until we break it open. Hence, all this." Gino swept an arm over the catastrophic mess that was his office desk. "Either none of the standard lock-picking strategies work, or I just fail at translating theory to practice. Place your bets."

Suzaku stared at the box. "Do you want me to fetch you a drill?"

The blond shook his head. "Probably not the best idea. Here, pick it up."

Suzaku looked at him quizzically for a moment, then followed. When he tilted the box from side to side, he heard (and felt) the telltale swish of liquid.

His first thought was, oddly enough, that this was another practical joke, with much ado for another bottle of whiskey. But he caught the look in Gino's eye, and slowly broke into a wry smile. "Acid?"

"I think so. Or a very strong base." Gino leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head, making it squeak a little. He was clearly tired, but still wore a smile. "The box is booby-trapped. If we force our way in, whatever else is in there - papers, probably, given the size - could get destroyed."

"And if we're not careful we could end up looking at a very serious workplace accident." Even he had to laugh at the thought of that. "Classic."

Gino nodded. "Whatever's in there, the good doctor clearly wanted to protect it from the wrong people. But neither his parents nor Cecile have any idea what it could be."

"For his eyes only then, maybe?" Suzaku placed the box back onto the nearest pile of papers, turning it until the front faced him. A single round keyhole glinted in the faint light, under _2601 _stenciled in black. Hadn't Lloyd said something about a 'key'? "Was there a key on the body?"

The other detective shook his head. He'd gotten up and unrolled his sleeves to the wrists again, and was rifling through a change jar he kept near the window. "It's literally a black box to us."

Suzaku frowned. "What are you doing?"

"Going to get some coffee. I think I need something stronger than what's 'on tap', so to speak."

Suzaku felt a new wave of guilt wash over him. "Look, I'm really sorry - "

"Stop that." Gino threw a nickel at him. The coin hit him square on the forehead before he could react, and the blond laughed as he let loose a string of curses. "I wasn't blaming you. And besides, we don't even know if this is relevant or not. For all we know, it could be something completely unimportant to us in there. Embarrassing poetry. Love notes."

The thought of Lloyd crafting flowery verses by candlelight was taking too much trouble to even come together, that Suzaku dropped it. "So what do we do with it?"

Gino shrugged on his coat. "Keep it here, for now. Until we can figure something else out. I was going to turn it over to the police station, until I find out who the shooter was. Any idea where we can stash it?"

"A few," Suzaku said slowly. He could take it home, but he doubted he could keep it from Kallen for very long before she started asking questions. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but he was quite significantly in her debt now. She'd use that to her advantage.

On the other hand, the booze drawer in his office had enough space in it still. And if he hadn't been fired yet, that was saying something wasn't it?

"All yours, then." Gino handed the box to him cheerfully. "Do you need me to walk you to your office?"

"I think I can manage to find it just fine, thanks." They exited Gino's office then, and the blond was locking the door behind him when Suzaku suddenly had a thought. "You said you left Colchester at two, right? And the drive took you less than half an hour?"

"Yup."

Suzaku hesitated. "...You wouldn't happen to have heard a phone ring, or anything, the whole time you were here?"

Gino frowned, but shook his head. "Were you waiting for a call?"

"No, no." Suzaku averted his eyes quickly. "Just wondering, is all."

They parted ways then, Suzaku struggling to get his door open while gingerly supporting the box in his other arm. He'd considered telling Gino about the strange phone call at the bar, but that would lead to a whole barrage of questions, most of them probably loaded, that he wouldn't quite know how to tackle. He tried to convince himself that worrying about it was pointless, anyway. Even Lelouch hadn't been the least bit concerned.

But then again, that was _Lelouch_.

(What were the chances Lelouch and the strange mystery caller knew each other?)

Suzaku snorted, finally hearing the satisfying click and pushing the door open. He was getting ahead of himself.

When he saw the large, elaborate flower arrangement sitting prominently in the center of his desk, however, he realized there were so many more questions he should have asked.

"What the..."

He probably should have been more concerned about possible booby-traps or poison, but he had already set down the box and fingered the petals by the time he remembered. Blue hydrangeas - they were arranged in tasteful bunches among other sprigs he couldn't recall the names of. The hydrangeas were of a rich color, very dark, closer to violet...they reminded him of Lelouch's eyes, and he was about to smile when he read the card.

_'Mon cher Suzaku'_, it began.

Shit.

_'You'll have to forgive me for being presumptuous. But a matter of much higher priority has arisen, and I am afraid I have to take leave of the country tomorrow night._

I haven't forgotten about our arrangement, though. Far from it. As a show of good faith, I'd like to meet with you tonight. Postpone whatever overtime work you were planning to do for another day. Client's request.'

Well. That certainly took care of his non-existent plans for the night. Suzaku sighed, glancing at the flowers again. Had these been dropped off last night, during the commotion? Or did Kanon or someone else slip in right under Gino's nose earlier that morning?

Either way, that meant it was remarkably easy to just walk into Camelot Investigations, if you just timed it right. Or lied, as Lelouch had done easily._ That_ would be a damaging tell-all story if Kallen ever got her hands on it, he thought.

He was about to chuck the card into the bin when a single line at the bottom of the card, underneath the seal, caught his eye. The strokes were quicker, and the fancy handwriting was not quite as impeccable as the rest of the letter, as though it had been added in afterthought:

_'P.S.: La Maison Rouge has a dress code. Wear a suit. You look fetching in white.'_

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Author's (end) notes: So hey, I think an apology is in order, because this was embarrassingly late in coming. In fact, the past few months have seen very little coherent writing from me, and what pittances of it that existed were spotty at best (and not posted _here_ in any case). My MSc Thesis would be an easy culprit to blame, though I did finish that in April (yay!) - I defend it for dear life in August (nuhhh). Between then and now though, I've been seriously re-evaluating my life choices, trying to find full-time work, and more than occasionally derping out over _Super Smash Bros. Brawl_ on the Wii. I've dropped deposited some fic bits here and there, but right now I am really trying to make up for lost time.

In the meantime, I hope you guys enjoyed!


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